Okay this is a simple action diary.  What's the action?  Getting off your rumps, coming out tonight, and meeting each-other at the OSU Rally!

Come on, there's not too many days left in the election! Let's go from net-roots to grassroots in Central Ohio!

    The official announcement will come tomorrow, Friday, at Dayton's Nutter Center, known locally as "the Nut House." Ya can't make this stuff up. (Someone on high is just begging for the headline: "The Lunatics HAVE Taken Over the Nut House.")

    According to CNN's anchor-pundits, however, the name will be officially leaked to the media (foretastes of a McCain Administration) late tonight, probably around midnight. The coincident timing of Barack Obama's Mile-High acceptance speech is purely accidental, we are assured. File this under "I have a drea...WE INTERRUPT THIS MESSAGE."

    In my last four diaries (click on my user name to retrieve), I have made the case that Rob Portman will be the pick. Johnnie-come-lately tipsters are bolstering the case: Rothenberg, for example, lists Portman as #1 of likely suspects, even though Rothenerg personally roots for Lieberman.

    (Thanks to Diary Rescue for rescuing my last installment!)

Some convention week fun...hope you enjoy.

    John McCain will announce the name of his running mate in Dayton on Friday at Wright State University, named of course for the Wright Brothers. Just miles from the old Wright air field, in the atom-bomb basket of America, amidst the oldest monuments of prehistoric North American civilization, the choice of location is rich in symbolism and foreshadowing.

    Every indication is that the pick will be native son Rob Portman, former southwest Ohio congressman, Bush Budget Director, and liar extraordinaire. The choice may fly or it may bomb.

    This is installment #4 in my exploration of Mr. Portman's grooming to be the number two man in America, and eventually number one. Please consult the first three parts for background, here (1), here (2), and here (3)

Read about it!

It will be nice to see the electoral maps that rely on the most recent poll flipping to Ohio (get right on that Jerome!). A key take away from this poll:

By a 44-39 percent margin, Florida voters want a Democrat in the White House. Ohio voters want a Democrat 44-35 percent and Pennsylvania voters are seeing blue 50-32 percent.

So Obama has room to grow, dispelling the smearing portrayals of him foisted by the rethugs, such as with the convention appearance last night, will likely help with that effort.

    John McCain is set to announce his choice of running mate on Friday at the Nutter Center (insert your own joke here) in Dayton, Ohio. According to Ed Rendell, that will be followed by a repeat announcement on Saturday in southwestern Pennsylvania.

    So there's no question that this pick will be aimed squarely at the so-called "white working-class" (translation: chronically unemployed lumpenproletariat) of Appalachia and its environs. In other words, voters who can be baffled by bullshit, in the view of the Republican campaign wizard-class.

    Every indication points to Rob Portman as the pick, despite the requisite head-fakes designed to throw us off-track. I've explored Mr. Portman in two recent diary segments here and here.

The Toledo Blade (that's Battleground Ohio) has done a truly remarkable eight month investigation of the health insurance industry. This is one of the most damning, if not the most damning series on healthcare in America I've seen to date.

Thanks go to devtob for bringing this series to my attention.

Every last voter in Ohio should hear over and over and over, day after day after day, that a vote for McSame is a vote for Murder By Spreadsheet. It is a vote to condemn yourself and your loved ones to death by insurance.

This is what the Toledo Blade investigation concluded.

"People with  health insurance were harmed because insurers interfered."

Please watch this introductory video.

    In Part I of this continuing series, we introduced Rob Portman, the native Cincinnatian who, according to White House leak artist Robert Novak, is the Bush Administration pick to be John McCain's running mate. Portman is now positioned to be annointed by McCain this coming Friday, at a strategically-planned unveiling in Dayton.

    Here I will explore how the Portman pick was planned long in advance, even before John McCain became his party's presumptive nominee. But before getting to the goods on Mr. Portman, allow me to correct one error from my previous diary:

    I had thought that Rob came from "relatively modest" roots, despite having attended the Cincinnati Country Day School -- Holy of Holies of the Ohio hoity-toity (say that ten times fast) -- before becoming a young Republican storm trooper at Dartmouth College. I now discover that his father, William C. Portman II, was founder and CEO of Portman Equipment Company, sold to establish the family fortune. I apologize to the entire Portman family for my inappropriate allegation of modesty.

On Friday, August 29th, at the Victory Center in Dayton, Ohio, John McCain will be celebrating his birthday and announcing his VP pick to 10,000 supporters.  It would, I think, be a great time to organize a large group of well-dressed, well-coiffed, unemployed (or, in the parlance of our day, under-employed) Buckeyes to greet Senator McCain with resumes and references in hand.  It is time for the Senator to make good on his promise to pay workers $50/hour to pick lettuce in Yuma, Arizona.

No canvassing for me this weekend.  I spent Saturday at a volunteer training event in Columbus, Ohio and I am now a Neighborhood Team Leader for the Obama/Biden campaign.    If you've taken on the role of "armchair campaign manager" recently, then this is the volunteer position for you.  If most of your diaries contain the theme "The Obama campaign needs to..." then this is the position for you.  If you deeply care about this campaign and want to make sure we win, then this is the position for you.  If you want to learn more about this role, follow me after the jump.

When I stumbled across this website back in 2004, I was a low-information voter. A Democratic voter, but one who along with the masses knew only the general structures of our government, knew only the key players, but was otherwise was oblivious to the daily machinations on Capitol Hill.

Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones was an unknown to me at the time, as she was for most people. When you're one in 435 members, it is difficult to raise your voice above the choir and separate yourself from the sea of suits on the House floor.

At the time of her untimely death, Congresswoman Tubbs Jones was still an unknown to most Americans.

In a world where politicians are made infamous by scandal, she, for the most part, kept her name out of the limelight. Where others clamored to the cameras to feed their egos, she kept offstage, content to serve her constituents and this nation diligently in the halls of Capitol Hill. She had her flaws and controversies, as all politicians do. But for a decade, as 1 of 435, she did her job, and did it well.

This was her pattern and practice. And that pattern and practice was shattered on January 6, 2005.

Those who are familiar with my early work here on Daily Kos know that election issues and protecting the vote are issues close to my heart. In the aftermath of the 2004 election, I dedicated a fair amount of time into investigating voter suppression and illegal tactics in Ohio.

That voter suppression--deliberate voter suppression--occurred in Ohio was clear. Then Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell promised to deliver his state for President Bush. The election was preceded by draconian rules on registration, illogical distribution of voting machines, and other measures clearly aimed at suppressing voter turnout in Democratic districts. On election day, we were greeted with images of Americans waiting three, four, five, six hours to vote. The lines snaked block after block, and those forced to wait in the rain and in the dark to cast their vote did so out of a visceral desire to prove that no one could take away their right to vote. Not without a fight, that is.

George Bush won Ohio, and the results were sent to the Senate and House. That there was--is--something disturbingly wrong with our electoral process was laid bare in Ohio. The question now was who had the courage to acknowledge it.

On January 6, 2005, the House considered the question of whether to certify the results of from the State of Ohio. Vice-President Dick Cheney presided over the process. And with the press and voters and most members of the House and Senate wanting to simply put the election debacle behind them, one voice was raised in the House, objecting to the certification of the Ohio votes:

Often, we rightly point out that it is in the nature of politicians to huddle together in passivity. It is safer in the pack of 435, where your colleague's apathy provides cover for your own and where acquiescence to the status quo is not only expected, but demanded. And this is in turn what we have come to expect from politicians. As a nation, we expect little in terms of courage and conviction. We have grown accustomed to the void of leadership. We have been offered the benign by those in power, and we have in large part accepted it because, well, that's just how screwed up our government is these days. When we dare to hope that politicians will act in accordance with our best interests rather than their next election, we brace ourselves for the inevitable and crushing disappointment that envelops us when politicians act like they have all along.

But once in a while, once in a great while these days, in the dull chambers of Congress, we witness a flicker of courage. A spark of principle that reminds us of what could be if politicians acted on principle rather than on pure politics.

For Congresswoman Tubbs Jones, January 6, 2005 was her fiery moment. It was then that she stood up in a chamber full of her colleagues and said that no, this stain on our democracy would not be swept under the rug. No, we could no longer afford to go on with business as usual. No, history would not look upon that Congress as silent and apathetic. No, none of that would come to pass because at least one woman, the Congresswoman from Ohio, stood up when the rest of her colleagues sat down and objected to the illusion of fairness in our democratic process.

Her objection was futile, to be sure, and the results were indeed certified. Yet, Congresswoman Tubbs Jones, like Senator Boxer in the Senate, knew that futility was not an excuse for silence in the face of wrong.

She stood up. She objected. She raised her solitary voice in that chamber and she preserved for history--even if it is just a footnote in history--that at least a handful of our politicians refuse to sweep errors in our election process under the rug.

That voice, silenced too soon by the hand of Fate, will echo in this blogger's heart and mind forever.

    John King of CNN got one thing right in his coverage of the Biden pick: Strategically, the choice of Biden was aimed at winning over the swing voters of southern Ohio.

    As such, it was the ultimate defensive move. McCain must win big in the rural south to compensate for Obama's urban masses and win Ohio. And McCain MUST win Ohio to win the national election. Deny McCain a landslide in southern Ohio and you close off his one path to victory. Joe Biden does that and does it well.

    For that and four other reasons, McCain is now constrained in his choice of running mate to only one from his shortlist. That one is former OH-02 Congressman, US Trade Representative, and Bush OMB Diretor Rob Portman.
   

All right, I lie.  There is no water cooler. **co, a Fortune 500 company fondly known as a "white-collar sweatshop", doesn’t keep the good water where the employees can gather ‘round and chatter.  Conversations are absolutely limited to fifteen minutes morning and afternoon in the official breakroom, where the line for the water cooler can be twenty deep at popular times.  Nevertheless, there is conversation, if brief  before returns to the waiting computers.  And there is CNN.  All day long, there is CNN.  Which is how I learned about the Biden selection ...

A second (!) Obama campaign office opened in Franklin County (Columbus) Ohio yesterday:

I stopped by today to get some bumperstickers & can report that the North Columbus local field office is already going strong. For comparison I checked out the McCain office on N. 5th St. downtown, and also the main Columbus Obama office on Rich St.

Cross-posted from OH-16: John Boccieri for U.S. Congress:

Somedays the Campaign Team at John Boccieri for U.S. Congress makes this job a true pleasure. We've been out stumping, knocking on doors, and holding "Backyard Town Hall Meetings". It's a great thing when it all comes together. Check out "our" new video!

Visit John Boccieri for U.S. Congress or call 330-754-0534 to volunteer for Team Boccieri!

From the AP:

A major voting machine maker has cautioned its customers in 34 states to look out for a programming error that may cause votes to be dropped.

At least 1,000 total votes were dropped in nine Ohio counties over the course of a handful elections back to 2006, including the March presidential primary, though the error was in all cases discovered and corrected within several hours. Premier Election Solutions Inc. previously had said complications with antivirus software caused the problem, but on Tuesday the company said in a product advisory that the problem is with the machines themselves.

Not good news. Not good at all. By the way, Premier Election Solutions Inc. is the company formerly known as Diebold. Yes, that Diebold. Although I believe George Bush won Ohio in 2004, that still makes it more disturbing.

While paper ballots will allow for checking the results, we still don't have them everywhere.

A great and inspiring congresswoman was lost today, Stephanie Tubbs Jones. The first African American woman to be in the congress from Ohio. She may not have been a Barack supporter, but I hope that everyone will take a moment to think about the enormous loss we have all sustained. She was a true democrat, opposed to the war, and a real person, who really cared about the people in her district.

I hope we can all take time over the next couple of days to remember her. An intelligent woman, who went to soon.

While troubled to see McCain ahead in the latest Reuters/Zogby poll, I was even more surprised at the media's reaction. First of all, this is not the latest nationwide poll. It was conducted August 14-16. The latest nationwide poll is LA Times/Bloomberg, conducted August 16-18 (with a larger sample size), which has Obama leading by 2.

Second, Reuters/Zogby is most likely an outlier. Unless, of course, you're willing to believe that he's lost the support of 12 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 in the last week.

But far more worrisome than Obama's performance in recent national polls are the numbers coming out of battleground states, particularly Ohio.