imageMcCain is on TV proposing some sort of national pie-growing contest or something.

Anyway, he's railing to his audience of people whose taxes he wants to cut that Obama is a bad socialist liberal because he wants to cut their taxes. The trick, you see, is to say that Obama wants to cut the income taxes of 95% of Americans, and we all know that 95% of Americans don't pay income taxes. The explanation that John McCain gives (and this is when he gives you the Straight Talk in his Herbert voice) is that Obama's going to take your money - apparently, McCain only gets the top 5% of income earners at his rallies, which explains a lot - and give it out to these roustabout non-income-tax payers in the form of tax credits, which is the socialist way of saying he's going to steal your money and dole it out to black people in fat stacks of one dollar bills.

There are only two small problems with this. The first is that Obama never says "income taxes", he says "taxes". This is because despite going on year 498 of conservatives insisting that only income taxes count, people pay other kinds of taxes. The second is that John McCain offers massive tax credits to every person in America.

Perhaps this would be a better political story for our cable news overlords to cover than the question of whether or not the race will tighten, which, after the next two weeks, will almost assuredly help produce tightening in the race.