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Since neither Palin nor McCain seem willing to call out the Brownshirts in their audience for their shouts of “Kill him”.

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating a threatening remark directed at Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama during a political event in Scranton.

The agency followed up on a report in The Times-Tribune that a member of the crowd shouted, “Kill him!” after one mention of Mr. Obama’s name during a rally Tuesday for Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin…Spokesman Darrin Blackford said the agency takes the threat seriously and will make an arrest if it can determine who shouted the remark.

There is a great deal of hand-wringing going on inside the Republican Party right now. The potential of a landslide blowout by Obama and the Democrats is inevitably leading to a battle over which faction will control the Republican Party after the election. On one side are the Limbaugh shock-troops, the loud angry social conservatives that have dominated the base for 25 years. These people are completely embarrassing to the intellectual movement conservatives like David Brooks.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

Chris Buckley, son of the founder of modern conservative thought William Buckley, just announced he was going to vote for Obama, partly because the right wing kooks scared the bejesus out of him.

My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. Read more…

It’s about time.

McCain just called on his supporters to be respectful at his town hall.

“We want to fight, and I want to fight, but we will be respectful,” McCain said to boos at first. “I want everyone to be respectful,” he then said and people began to clap.

In response to a later question he added, “You can be respectful and point out facts,” as he called on his supporters to point out facts to their neighbors but be respectful.

*** UPDATE *** McCain just added, “He is a decent person and a person who you do not have to be scared as president of the United States.”

Update 2. Some Republican candidates like Norm Coleman are distancing themselves from the McCain campaign.

Coleman told reporters that he would not be appearing at a planned rally with McCain this afternoon. Could it be McCain’s sliding polling numbers in Minnesota? His attacks on Obama? Coleman said he needs the time to work on suspending his own negative ads.

“Today,” he said, “people need hope and a more positive campaign is a start.”

Pity the African-American TV cameraman assigned to cover a Sarah Palin brownshirt rally. He should be getting hazardous duty pay.

From Jacksonville in the northeast to Pensacola in the Panhandle, the fiery crowds gathered to jeer at any hint of liberalism, boo loudly at the mere mention of Senator Barack Obama’s name and heckle the traveling press corps (at a rally in Clearwater, one man hurled a racial epithet at a television cameraman).

If there were undecideds, independents or swing voters among them, they were awfully hard to spot.

Let’s be clear. Sarah Palin is not being employed to change the minds of “undecideds, independents or swing voters”. She is being used to rile up the Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity base. The McCain campaign is playing defense when they are three touchdowns behind, late in the fourth quarter.

I work at USC and we know this is not a strategy for victory.