The past couple of weeks have been very good for Mitt Romney's 17 grandchildren. Last Wednesday, Romney told a New Hampshire audience he wanted to leave all of his estimated $250 million estate to his grandkids. Then on Monday, a new CBS poll showed their grandfather beating President Obama in a head-to-head matchup.

And that's very good news indeed for the Romney clan. After all, if their patriarch gets his way as President, the estate tax will be eliminated. That means a potential $80 million windfall for the next generation of Romneys, courtesy of all other American taxpayers who will have to make up the shortfall. And as it turns out, that payday from the U.S. Treasury will more than offset the $45 million of his own money Mitt burned through during his first run for President.

It was during that campaign four years ago that Mitt Romney first tried to explain how he cared about America's grandchildren by speaking about his own. As Time reported on January 24, 2008, according to Mitt's beatitude the young Romney chic shall inherit his worth:

Romney's stump speech includes a jokey story about the joys of becoming a grandfather, in which he recounts how, after he became a grandfather he went to his lawyer and told him he'd like to change his will. Initially, he said, he was going to leave everything to his sons. He tells the lawyer he'd like to include his grandchildren now. "And what percentage do you want to leave to your grandchildren?" asks the lawyer. "You don't understand," Romney says, "I want to leave it all to my grandchildren. My boys can make their own money."

But Mitt didn't literally mean "all" of his estimated $250 million worth. As it turned out, $45 million of it went to a higher calling. That calling was not his church, but his ambition to become President of the United States.

As the Boston Globe reported on July 16, 2008, Romney "will not seek donations to repay $45 million in personal loans he made to his failed presidential bid -- the biggest ever made by a candidate in a primary campaign." The Globe explained the importance of that write-off for the $250 million man who this year declared himself part of the "80 to 90 percent of us" who are middle class:

The move could clear away the last remnants of a divisive primary race, insuring that he and his financial supporters are focused on helping McCain...Still, Romney's investment in his own campaign and the donor network he built may have helped his vice presidential stock go up. The $45 million helped win widespread name recognition for Romney, who also raised more than $65 million from donors. Since McCain clinched the nomination in March, Romney has asked his supporters to contribute to a Republican National Committee fund that will be used to help McCain's candidacy and he has urged his campaign finance team to work for McCain.

(Ultimately, Mitt got John McCain's endorsement in 2012, if not the number two spot on McCain's ticket in 2008.)

Still, four years and $45 million later, Mitt Romney has recycled his old anecdote about his own grandchildren to show how he somehow cares about yours. Days before he described starting his career at the "entry level," fretting about "pink slips" and his love of being able to "fire people," Mitt once again stumbled over his stacks of cash (around the 2:30 mark above):

Indeed, Romney's tendency to misstep is often related to his clumsy efforts to downplay his upper-echelon socioeconomic background. At a rally in Peterborough last week, he was in the midst of responding to a softball question from a young boy in the audience about why he would go through the "difficulties" of running for president when he went on a long riff about re-writing his will.

Before, he said, he'd planned to leave everything to his sons, but now, he laughed, "I want to leave it all to my grandchildren." He then tried to pivot quickly back to his larger point--that he wanted his grandkids to inherit a better country. But the net effect of his story was to remind voters of his immense wealth--a subject that his rivals and the Obama campaign have frequently used to suggest he's out of touch with the travails of ordinary Americans.

Of course, it's easy for Mitt Romney to be out of touch when losing $45 million is almost an afterthought. Besides, if he succeeds at eliminating the estate tax, his heirs will more than get that back.

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I can think of very few reasons (none of them good) why Obama is so determined not to fix the actual problems in the banking industry. Economist James Galbraith spells out what needs to be done:

When the crisis went public in August 2007, Henry Paulson's Treasury took every step to prevent the final collapse from happening before the 2008 elections, extracting billions from the Federal Housing Authority and from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relieve the pressure on bank balance sheets. It worked until it didn't. In September 2008 the collapse of Lehman triggered the collapse of American International Group (AIG) and the steps that led to the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) and to the effective nationalization of the commercial paper market, meaning that the Federal Reserve has become the primary short-term funder of major American corporations.

Upon taking office, President Obama had a chance to change course and didn't take it. By seizing the largest problem banks, the government could have achieved clean audits, replaced top management, cured destructive compensation practices, shrunk a bloated industry, and cut the banks' lobbying power and therefore their capacity to obstruct financial reform. The way to write-downs of bad mortgage debt and therefore to financial recovery would have been opened.

None of this happened. Instead the Treasury administered fake "stress tests" and relaxed mark-to-market accounting rules for toxic assets which permitted the banks to defer losses and to continue to carry trash on their books at inflated values. This reassured the banks that they would not be permitted to fail—and so back to bonuses-as-usual they went. The banks survived, and the administration today claims this “proves” they didn’t need to be taken over. But to what end did they survive? The banks are bigger, more powerful, and more obstructionist than ever—and largely uninterested in making new commercial, industrial, or residential loans.

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In the last few days, there has been a significant shift in the political winds in Washington towards real health care reform, with a robust public health insurance option at its heart. The last thing we need is someone nay-saying that reform won't pass.

Why, then, is Senator Diane Feinstein doing just that, saying she's not sure reform is going to pass? She should help us make history, not stand in the way!

Sign the petition urging Feinstein to stand up for Californians and America.

Now, let's take a look at the landscape.

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When it was revealed in October that the Republican National Committee spent a whopping $180,000 on new clothes for Sarah Palin and her family, the McCain/Palin campaign promised that all the clothes would be donated to charity after Election Day. (McCain said on October 26 that 1/3 of the clothes had already been returned). Well, according to the NewMajority website, the clothes are sitting in trash bags at RNC headquarters in D.C.

New Majority:

But for reasons that remain mysterious, the clothes remain stashed at the RNC's Washington, D.C., headquarters. A source close to the issue told NewMajority that the clothes are "in the process" of being donated, and an RNC spokesman corroborated, saying the clothes have indeed been returned from Palin, "inventoried and will be appropriately dispersed to various charities." Attempts for an explanation of when and where the clothes will be donated went unanswered, and the governor's Alaska office does not comment on campaign issues.

The fact that the clothes have not been donated or publicly accounted for, however, has angered some big donors - who want to know exactly how their money was spent, and who are already enraged by the extravagant wardrobe figure. They say it's time for the RNC to air its dirty laundry, if you will.

This should really come as no surprise, being that we're talking about the disastrous McCain/Palin campaign. I just never thought that we would still be hearing stories like this three months after the election. Sheesh. Looks like those RNC lawyers dispatched to Alaska to retrieve Palin's clothes forgot to "donate" them.

Back in May, I argued that with the American electorate's across-the-board preference for Democratic policies and a historically unpopular Republican president, John McCain's campaign would turn the November election into a "character war." In September, campaign chairman Rick Davis confirmed the GOP would follow its tried and true strategy from 2000 and 2004 when he announced "this election is not about issues" but instead about "a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." On Tuesday night, Americans will learn not only whether Barack Obama won the election, but whether voters literally thought he was a better man.

Heading into Election Day, Senator Obama looks like to outperform his recent Democratic predecessors across a range of policy and demographic measures. An October Rasmussen survey showed that Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans across each of the 10 issues tracked. The party of Obama enjoys double-digit leads on the economy (by 13%), Social Security (12%), health care (20%)and education (by 19 points).

That issue advantage, compounded by John McCain's feeble response to the economic crisis and the GOP's increasingly xenophobic line towards immigrants, is helping fuel Obama's strong performance among critical voting blocks. As I detailed last week, media myths notwithstanding, Barack Obama will approach traditional levels of Democratic support among Jewish voters and outpoll Al Gore and John Kerry among Hispanics. And with his backing among white voters reaching 44% in the final CBS News/New York Times survey, the African-American Obama may surpass the levels achieved by Gore (42%), Kerry (41%) and even Bill Clinton (43%). Four years ago, John Kerry lost among white men by a 25 point margin (62% to 37%); according to a Fox News poll, Obama now trails John McCain by only 5 points among the same group.

But from the moment John McCain secured the Republican nomination, his fall strategy rested on creating a "character gap" between himself and Obama. As in 2000 and 2004, I argued, the Republicans would try to turn the race into a presidential personality contest:

And to win it, they need to manufacture a "character gap" between John McCain and Barack Obama...The data is clear. If the election is about the economy, health care and Iraq, John McCain cannot become the 44th president. Only if the GOP succeeds once again in transforming the race into a media medley about lapel pins, angry ministers and Muslim-sounding middle names can the Republicans hope to maintain their hold on the White House.

Sadly, we've been here before. The 2000 and 2004 exit polls clearly show the Republican Party succeeded both in portraying the presidential contest as being about character and in defining the accepted media narrative for candidates Bush, Gore and Kerry.

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I touch wood everytime I say or write that it now looks as nearly certain as it can be that Obama will be the next President of the United States. But, of course, Obama is correct that all the polling in the world is meaningless if people decide that they can stay home on Election Day because Obama is going to win anyway. So get out there.

And while you're at it, make sure you know your rights and be on the look out for vote supression tricks. The Obama campaign has a new video on the GOP's voter supression campaign - because the lower the vote the better it is for Republicans. They thrive in a climate of disenfranchisement.

Despite all their accusations, even the McCain campaign admit they can't make the voter fraud claim stick:

For weeks, Republican leaders have warned that widely reported problems with fake voter registrations could result in a flood of phony votes in pivotal states.

But Ronald Michaelson, a veteran election administrator and member of the McCain-Palin Honest and Open Election Committee, said in an interview that he could not name a single instance in which this had occurred.

“Do we have a documented instance of voting fraud that resulted from a phony registration form? No, I can’t cite one, chapter and verse,” he said.

Which makes their accusations a form of fraud in its own right, doesn't it? One that's been falsely used to fuel "Republicans’ invocation of legal power to scrutinize voters, demands for U.S. Justice Department intervention and court orders, and criminal investigations."

But make no mistake - if the Republican's can't steal the election through voter suppression and voting irregularities they'll use that failure as an excuse to accuse Democrats of stealing it. The McCain campaign and Republicans have already trotted out dozens of excuses but there's only one reason McCain will lose - Obama is the better man for the job.

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Bill Maher closed Friday night's "New Rules" with a great recap of the 2008 election and why it's been the best, most unpredictable race in history.

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Senator Biden took to the stage today in Tampa, Florida to defend his running mate from John McCain's pathetic character assault. Reminding voters that McCain has permitted his running mate to raise the most vile of innuendos and that he's hired the same people who personally destroyed him in 2000, Biden knocks it out of the park.

"Last week I had a debate with Governor Palin. Well, at least I think it was a debate. And last night Senator Obama had his second with John McCain. I know I'm prejudiced abut my ticket, but if this were a best of five series, it would be over.

We want a leader, an optimist. Not an angry man lurching from one position to another.

When you vote with George Bush 90% of the time, you're best hope is attacking your opponent 100% of the time."

I don't want to tempt fate, but things are looking pretty bad for the GOP in the coming elections.

For instance, Al Franken looks like he's giving incumbent Republican Norm Coleman nightmares in Minnesota. He's ahead by 43 to 34 percent in the latest poll there, published Saturday by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. The new poll suggests that one reason for Franken’s gain is voters’ reaction to the abrasive advertising in the campaign. The Independence Party candidate, Dean Barkley, is also drawing support from Coleman says the poll.

And there's more good news both for Dems looking at voter registration as a way to tip the scales in November, as well as for third party aficionados.

The poll detected a significant increase in Minnesotans who label themselves as Democrats. Forty-two percent of likely voters identified themselves as Democrats, compared with 27 percent who said they were independents, and 26 percent who said they were Republicans.

According to the poll, Coleman’s support has slid among men and those in upper- and lower-income brackets. Last month, Coleman led Franken among men, 46 to 36 percent; in the recent poll Franken is ahead, 45 to 34 percent.

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On Friday, a car bomb blew up three civilians and eight Russian soldiers, including a senior officer, in the disputed South Ossetia region of Georgia. Russia blames the Georgian secret service for the blast, saying they are trying to destabilize the fragile ceasefire while the Georgians (rather less believably) say the explosion was a false flag operation - that Russia blew up its own peacekeeping troops in order to blame Saakashvili's government and to give an excuse for delaying an expected pullback of Russian troops. However, the Georgian interior ministry spokesman who made the counter-allegation offered no evidence that the Russians had any actual plans to delay their pullback.

It's a messy incident, one that shows the Caucusus conflict is far from finished creating tensions both in the region and globally, and also offers more opportunity for observers to question just how trustworthy and truthful Saakashvili's regime is being. The original midnight all-out attack on his own region's capital which started the whole current confrontation might be reason enough for some - Colin Powell certainly seems to be in that camp - but now Georgian opposition members are also calling attention back to last years elections and widespread abuses of both opposition members and the press.

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