The Ashford Zone Blog

The latest… Ken Adelman:

Ken Adelman is a lifelong conservative Republican. Campaigned for Goldwater, was hired by Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity under Nixon, was assistant to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld under Ford, served as Reagan’s director of arms control, and joined the Defense Policy Board for Rumsfeld’s second go-round at the Pentagon, in 2001. Adelman’s friendship with Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their wives goes back to the sixties, and he introduced Cheney to Paul Wolfowitz at a Washington brunch the day Reagan was sworn in.

In recent years, Adelman and his friends Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz fell out over his criticisms of the botching of the Iraq War. Still, he remains a bona-fide hawk (“not really a neo-con but a con-con”) who has never supported a Democrat for President in his life. Two weeks from now that’s going to change: Ken Adelman intends to vote for Barack Obama.

You can read the reasons why here.  It's not because Adelman suddenly became an America-hating liberal.  It's because of McCain's temperment (i.e. his weird behavior by suspending his campaign for two days during the economic crisis), and McCain's lack of judgement (selecting Palin as Veep).

As a follow-up, watch the heads spin at The Corner.

Yes, there are some, and watch how they take on an anti-Muslim McCain supporter at a McCain rally…

Of course, all we know is the party affiliations of North Carolina early voters, and not how they actually vote.

Still this bodes well:

As of this morning [Monday, October 20], over 340,000 North Carolinians have cast general election ballots, with the vast majority taking advantage of the state's early in-person absentee voting, dubbed "One Stop" by Tar Heels.

Over six million state residents are registered to vote in North Carolina, one of the nation's newest political battlegrounds.

Of 270,000 in-person voters since "One Stop" opened last Thursday, over 60% were registered Democrats, compared to only 20% Republicans. (The remainder: mostly unaffiliated voters, who make up about 20% of the state's electorate.)

Of the 66,000 civilians who have mailed in absentee ballots, Republicans have outnumbered Democrats by a margin of about 2-1. 

Still, registered Democrats make up 55% of those who have already cast votes for the North Carolina general election, while registered Republicans account for less than one in three ballots already cast.

It's the intolerance, stupid:

I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?[…]

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards–Purple Heart, Bronze Star–showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross, it didn't have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.

This is the photo that Powell was referring to…from The New Yorker: :

This photo needs to be sent to every bone-headed American who has a "Support Our Troops" bumper sticker and who thinks one can't be a good Muslim-American.  Lots of heads will be exploding….

There are at least 200 people here in line at the Clemmons Library at 10:30. The early polls voting opened at 10:00. A mixed bag of young and old, black and white….

More people pouring in. Haven't made it inside the library yet….

Not entirely unexpected….

On ABC, CNN’s David Gergen called it the “most important” endorsement of the 2008 campaign thus far.

Tina Fey as Sarah Palin on SNL last night, and Sarah Palin as Sarah Palin, too (she appears twice)…