Earmark factoid of the day.

How much money would it take to provide earmarks for all Americans at the same rate that Sarah Palin bagged them for Wasila? On an annual basis?

A mere half a trillion dollars.

Exact number $422,302,519,152.

Check out the latest McCain ad, especially the line, “How disrespectful.” Doesn’t it just drip with contempt? The sort of old-fashioned contempt that whites often held blacks in (and obviously still do). Take a look.

Palin happy to perpetuate the Iraq-tied-to-9/11 lie. That and the day’s other political mythology in today’s TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

E.J. Dionne: “McCain has shown he wants the presidency so badly that he’s willing to say anything, true or false, to win power. Obama can win by fighting for what he believes. What he can’t do is wait for the media to call McCain out — although they should — or expect voters to know he’ll fight for them when they are not yet sure that he’s willing to stand up for himself.”

One point E.J. mentions that I’ve noticed too. Beside his convention speech, I can’t think of a time in the last week or so that I saw Obama in front of a crowd. The appearances that I’m seeing showing up on TV during the day (an incomplete but probably not unrepresentative sampling) all look like there in front of a hundred or so people in a library or something. I wonder whether the celeb thing has just gotten inside his people’s collective head and they’re afraid to get him in front of real crowds.

If so, it’s a very bad mistake. He has to be who he is. He can’t run from his strengths. And he needs to charge up the people who want to be in the trenches with him. Excitement is infectious.

“Energy. She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.”

That’s John McCain on Sarah Palin. Even better? It’s McCain’s answer to what her foreign policy credentials are …

I think at this point we need to confront the fact that we don’t know yet which is more uncomfortable: watching Sarah Palin try to demonstrate her qualifications to be president or watching John McCain try to describe them.

From the AP on Palin’s interview …

John McCain running mate Sarah Palin sought Thursday to defend her qualifications but struggled with foreign policy, unable to describe President Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive strikes against threatening nations and acknowledging she’s never met a foreign head of state.

The Republican vice presidential nominee told Charles Gibson of ABC News in her first televised interview since being named to the GOP ticket that “I’m ready” to be president if called upon. However, she sidestepped on whether she had the national security credentials needed to be commander in chief.

A second AP article lede …

The “Straight Talk Express” has detoured into doublespeak.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment. He accuses Democrat Barack Obama of calling Palin a pig, which did not happen. He says Obama would raise nearly everyone’s taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts instead.

Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain’s skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama’s campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.

Sarah Palin’s “perhaps” in response to the question of whether we might have to go to war with Russia over Georgia is getting a lot of attention. The truth, though, is that Palin was doing little more that drawing out the logical inference of McCain & Co.’s unhinged policy vis a vis Russia — not a huge surprise if you’ve just learned the policy in the last week. But McCain and those in his entourage at least have the seasoning to know not to traipse into throwaway hypotheticals about ‘war’ with the only other country in the world with a vast and eminently deliverable nuclear arsenal.

Late Update: A further point. It’s true that Obama and Biden both favor Georgia’s accession into NATO — a very bad policy position, as I’ve argued before. However, I do not think that their positions and McCain’s positions are equal. The best analogy I can point to is the nominal agreement on Iraq policy (embodied in the Iraq Liberation Act) between the Clinton administration and the most radical neocons in the late 1990s. Nominally, they shared a policy. In practice, however, it was one group that was completely nuts and gung-ho in favor of a reckless idea and another that was sort of dabbling in and passively favoring the same policy. Not that that is saying much in the latter’s favor. But there’s a big difference.

The awkward moment when Charlie Gibson tries his best not to press the point that Sarah Palin doesn’t know what he’s referring to when he asks her about the “Bush Doctrine” …

Book Clubbin’ with Hendrik Hertzberg: Is the fruit-fly-like proliferation of parties in the Knesset a good thing?