It's finally debateday.

* McCain has stepped up his criticism of Gwen Ifill after yesterday's declaration that he has "confidence" in her fairness. Meanwhile an AP report suggests that she may indeed need to step aside:

The host of PBS'"Washington Week" and senior correspondent on "The NewsHour" said she did not tell the Commission on Presidential Debates about the book. The commission had no immediate comment when contacted by The Associated Press. A spokeswoman for John McCain's campaign did not immediately return phone and e-mail messages.

There should have been an explicit conversation about this between Ifill and the Commission and another between Ifill, the Commission, and the campaigns; if that didn't happen because Ifill didn't disclose the book, that looks to me like a pretty serious breach of journalistic ethics.

Of course, it's the day of the debate, probably too late to replace her, so at this point the alleged conflict reduces to little more than a bid to work the refs and a preemptive excuse for Palin's failures. Like the McCain of yesterday, I have confidence she'll be fair, but it's really too bad that she handed the Republicans such a nice talking point.

* There's lots of speculation that McCain's last ace in the hole is Rev. Wright. Chuck Todd says it's too little, too late, and I tend to agree.

* Kos had a good post last night about McCain's strategic dilemma, the fact that any attempt to play offense in the battlegrounds could result in surprise (and devastating) losses in places like Indiana and North Carolina. North Carolina in particular is an interesting case—another poll (Rasmussen's) put Obama up three here last week, and there's good reason to think NC is a genuine battleground this year. But any time or money McCain sinks into keeping North Carolina is lost for Ohio and Florida, states he also needs to win. The map at right has Obama at 269, already a likely-if-ugly win for Obama. A loss in any of what's left will cost McCain the election—he needs the whole slate of swing states just to tie, and right now he's behind in most.

* More swing-state talk from Chuck Todd.

* The headline reads: "Obama Makes McCain Very Uncomfortable."

Let the record reflect that Barack Obama made the approach to John McCain tonight.

As the two shared the Senate floor tonight for the first time since they won their party nominations, Obama stood chatting with Democrats on his side of the aisle, and McCain stood on the Republican side of the aisle.

So Obama crossed over into enemy territory.

He walked over to where McCain was chatting with Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida and Independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut. And he stretched out his arm and offered his hand to McCain.

McCain shook it, but with a “go away” look that no one could miss. He tried his best not to even look at Obama.

Finally, with a tight smile, McCain managed a greeting: “Good to see you.”

Obama got the message. He shook hands with Martinez and Lieberman — both of whom greeted him more warmly — and quickly beat a retreat back to the Democratic side.

Ambinder explains why these sorts of stories (here's another from the Washington Post) make Republican strategists very nervous.

* And Jack Cafferty wants to know how anyone, including McCain, can take Sarah Palin seriously. Steve Benen has a good post up at Washington Monthly about the now-infamous Supreme Court question last night, about how (among other things) it eviscerates the justification for the pro-life position through its concession of a right to privacy. She may muddle through tonight's debate, she may not, but if she survives as a credible national figure after this cycle she certainly doesn't deserve to.

Nobel Prize committee to U.S. authors: "Drop dead."

Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press that US writers were "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture", which he said dragged down the quality of their work. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining."

Don't let anyone tell you offshore drilling is safe, or that it has no costs.

At least 500,000 gallons of oil — nearly 12,000 barrels — spilled into the ocean and tidal wetlands along the Texas and Louisiana coasts after Hurricane Ike ripped up oil platforms, and ruptured tanks and pipelines, according to an Associated Press investigation.

That's about 5% of the oil spilled due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge—many once sold for well over $500,000—but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied. Susan McDonald, president of the local residents’ association and an executive at a local bank, told the Associated Press, “There’s been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years.”

In the first half of last year, residential burglaries rose by 35 percent and robberies by 58 percent in suburban Lee County, Florida, where one in four houses stands empty...

Suburbs: the new slums. See also.

Random midday politics links.

* From kottke I find out NASA is fifty years old today.

* The Environmental Protection Agency is warning its pollution enforcement officials not to talk directly to congressional investigators, reporters and even the agency's own inspector general, according to an internal e-mail provided to The Associated Press. Just another day in George Bush's America, 174 more days to go.

* And the presidential race is still close here in North Carolina:

The new numbers from Public Policy Polling (D): McCain 47%, Obama 44%, and Barr 3%, with a ±3.4% margin of error. Four weeks ago, it was McCain 45%, Obama 41%, and Barr 5%.

You'll be glad to know South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has been found. He was, of course, in Argentina. Edge of the American West sums it all up:

What he was doing there remains unclear. The governor claimed he was simply driving along the coast line in Argentina. The Appalachian Trail, his original destination, proved unattractive:

The Republican governor told the South Carolina newspaper he decided at the last minute to go to the South American country. The governor says he had considered hiking on the Appalachian Trail but wanted to do something “exotic.”

So he flew to Argentina to drive the coast. The problem, as the Associated Press pointed out, is that driving the coast in Argentina is not all that easy:

Trying to make such a drive could frustrate a weekend visitor to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, the Avenida Costanera is the only coastal road, and it’s less than two miles long. Reaching coastal resorts to the south requires a drive of nearly four hours on an inland highway with views of endless cattle ranches. To the north is a river delta of islands reached only by boat.

TPM wants it made clear that Sanford and his staff didn't "come clean" about this; Sanford was caught coming off a plane after a reporter received a tip. ThinkProgress wants to know why they lied in the first place. Weirder and weirder.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention this in the original post, but as Neil points out in the comments, of course it's winter there.

Things that are guaranteed to totally wig me out: AP probes that find trace amounts of drugs in our drinking water.

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

Steven Benen of Political Animal also has more on the Ron Fournier Follies at the Associated Press. Go get him, MoveOn.

Yes we can update for a Friday night.

* Obama wins Omaha.

* Franken fairly likely to win Minnesota.

An Associated Press analysis of the nearly 25,000-vote difference in presidential and Senate race tallies shows that most ballots lacking a recorded Minnesota Senate vote were cast in counties won by Democrat Barack Obama.

...

"These numbers present a roadmap for a Franken challenge," he said. "It suggests there are about 10,000 votes in the largest Democratic counties that are potentially going to tilt in Franken's direction."

Waive the recount, Norm! For the good of the nation.

* Uncounted votes may push Begich past Stevens.

* "Revolution as Fulfillment," or "It was a creed written into the founding documents": how America perpetually repositions its revolutionary breaks as continuity with the past.

The black belt rhetorical jiu jitsu of the “I Have A Dream” speech is that King pulls it off. He convinced the better part of a nation that dismantling segregation was not so scary, not so radical, but really what they’d all meant to do all along. They just hadn’t gotten around to it, like the laundry I need to sort, or those slaves Jefferson never quite got to freeing. … And this is an old and hallowed American trick. On July 4th, 1852, Frederick Douglass blistered the ears of his white audience with prophesy … Douglass reveals that, “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” the Constitution is in fact “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” He embraces and celebrates the Constitution as a bulwark against slavery. … At Seneca Falls in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton cribbed Jefferson’s words for her Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, the intimation being that “of course” the patriarchs of 1776 must have intended equal rights for women. … And so on and so on down through history, with every kind of American reformer looking backward to move forward, couching their goals as nothing more radical than America’s alleged founding ideals.

* From 52 to 48 with love: Ze Frank lets the healing begin.

Thank God it's Tuesday.

* Were you watching the time-travel show Journeyman on NBC this year? You'll never get another episode, but at least you can find out how it all would have ended.

* Bush 'antagonizing environmentalists' on his way out of office.

Just months before President Bush leaves office, his administration is antagonizing environmentalists by proposing changes that would allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether subdivisions, dams, highways and other projects have the potential to harm endangered animals and plants.

The proposal, first reported by The Associated Press, would cut out the advice of government scientists who have been weighing in on such decisions for 35 years. Agencies also could not consider a project's contribution to global warming in their analysis.

This is nothing we haven't seen before.

* Honda to debut hydrogen-fuel cell car in 2008. We're saved! Unless, you know, the debunkers turn out to be right about hydrogen...

* Fraggmented's John Seavey makes one his storytelling engine posts about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, explaining why the show was never the same (and could never have been the same) after the characters graduated high school.

* A Mac utility that automatically shuts down your Internet connectivity for any length of time you specify. I wouldn't be attracted to something like this if I had any willpower at all.

* Fred Pearce argues the Neo-Malthusian "population bomb" has been defused. We're saved!

Why then is the world’s population still rising? Currently at around 6.7 billion, it is 70 million higher every year. The problem is that the delivery wards are being visited by the huge numbers of young women born during the earlier baby boom. They may only have one or two children each. But that is still a lot of babies. Probably nothing will stop humanity reaching 8 billion by about 2040 and many demographers predict that world population will peak at around 9 billion by the end of the 21st century. But once those baby boomers have had their babies, the falling fertility rate will be translated into a real decline in the world’s population — the first since the Black Death of the 14th century.

The question remains, I think, whether 9 billion will be a Malthusian crisis all by itself.

* And it may be time to rethink climate change in the face of the polar bear menace.

Domestic terrorism in Kentucky? The FBI is investigating whether anti-government sentiment led to the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery. A law enforcement official told The Associated Press the word "fed" was scrawled on the dead man's chest. Tragic. A few more details here and here. The Bachmann connection made in the MeFi post will be important if this does turn out to be motivated by right-wing paranoia.