Time to celebrate.

NBC calls Ohio for Obama.

Vote!

The final polls look great for Barack Obama. In many polls, his lead is expanding. I’ve been seeing Reverend Wright commercials all weekend through today. I wonder if these last-minute ads are hurting McCain instead of Obama.

Now if just comes down to turnout.

With his endorsement of John McCain, Dick Cheney gave the Obama campaign a nice gift to close out the campaign.

It’s embarrassing that the McCain campaign is clinging to Joe the Plumber in a final act of deperation. Mr. Plumber hit a new low when he agreed with a loon at a rally that the election of Barack Obama would lead to he death of Israel.

Shep Smith, one of the few voices of reason at Fox News, interviews Joe about his statement and unmasks him as a complete fool.

Hat tip – Andrew Sullivan.

Tom Friedman writes about the huge problems facing Iran now that oil prices have collapsed.

I’ve always been dubious about Barack Obama’s offer to negotiate with Iran — not because I didn’t believe that it was the right strategy, but because I didn’t believe we had enough leverage to succeed. And negotiating in the Middle East without leverage is like playing baseball without a bat.

Well, if Obama does win the presidency, my gut tells me that he’s going to get a chance to negotiate with the Iranians — with a bat in his hand.

Have you seen the reports that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is suffering from exhaustion? It’s probably because he is not sleeping at night. I know why. Watching oil prices fall from $147 a barrel to $57 is not like counting sheep. It’s the kind of thing that gives an Iranian autocrat bad dreams.

After all, it was the collapse of global oil prices in the early 1990s that brought down the Soviet Union. And Iran today is looking very Soviet to me.

As Vladimir Mau, president of Russia’s Academy of National Economy, pointed out to me, it was the long period of high oil prices followed by sharply lower oil prices that killed the Soviet Union. The spike in oil prices in the 1970s deluded the Kremlin into overextending subsidies at home and invading Afghanistan abroad — and then the collapse in prices in the ‘80s helped bring down that overextended empire.

This is an example of the tremendous leverage we get by destroying domestic demand for oil by switching to alternative fuels.

New ad from the Obama campaign.

Some of the polls have tightened a little, but most are holding steady and we have some outliers showing a huge lead for Obama. The state polls also look great.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign has finally started to talk about the economy, but they can’t even get that right.

If McCain had not opposed the Bush tax cuts in the past, and if he was proposing a flat tax, he might have some credibility on this idiotic charges of “socialism.” One wonders whether he really is senile. Also, when you add in the economic genius of Sarah Palin (she must have shaken hands with Mitt Romney), your argument looks even more ridiculous, given that Sarah Palin raised taxes on the oil companies in Alaska in order to redistribute the tax dollars to all Alaskans in the form of a check.

Of course, she’s too stupid to understand the irony here, and McCain has no trouble repeating any charge trumped up by his idiotic advisors. So, they continue to stomp around the country calling Obama names and revealing themselves as utter fools.

This campaign is a disgrace. Many conservatives have already come to that conclusion. Others are so blinded by their own idiology that they drink up the silly name-calling, hoping for a dramatic comeback. Fortunately, their numbers seem to be shrinking.

The polls looks grim, and it appears that some in the Republican Party are losing their marbles as they pull out all the stops in a desperate attempt to win this election. With this story, they may have reached a new low.

With Rove and Bush the Republicans have been peddling fear for years, and McCain and Palin have been more than happy to use the same tactics. It shouldn’t be surprising when some nuts in their party escalate the attacks to even more offensive extremes.