My friends, it's John McCain, live from New York, just three days before the election. Aides to the Republican presidential candidate said Friday that McCain will make a detour from battleground states to appear on "Saturday Night Live," the late-night show that has been a must-watch for many during the political season.  Hosting the show this Saturday is actor Ben Affleck, a supporter of Democratic candidate Barack Obama. The musical guest is singer David Cook.  When McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, appeared on the show Oct. 18, "Saturday Night Live" earned its best ratings in 14 years. Former star and head writer Tina Fey, a Palin lookalike, has been at the center of the show's recent parodies of the campaign. "SNL" regular Darrell Hammond impersonates McCain on the late-night show, now in its 34th season.  McCain last appeared on "Saturday Night Live" in May, after clinching the nomination and while the Democratic primary continued. The 72-year-old Arizona senator joked about his age, saying: "I ask you, what should we be looking for in our next president? Certainly, someone who is very, very, very old."  When McCain hosted "SNL" in 2002, he mocked singer Barbra Streisand's political advocacy by performing a medley of her songs. Obama appeared on "Saturday Night Live" briefly last season but canceled a return for its season opener in September, citing the devastation brought to parts of the country by Hurricane Ike. Reported by FoxNews.

If Sen. Barack Obama loses the presidency or wins by far narrower margins than the double-digit lead some mainstream media polls predict, his weak performance will not be the result of the so-called “Bradley Effect,” which holds that black candidates underperform at the polls due to latent racism. Rather, the true culprit will be something public opinion scholars call the “Spiral of Silence Theory.” In the 1970s, German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann introduced a provocative and startling theory of mass communication she called the “Spiral of Silence.” Noelle-Neumann argued that when mass media create an impression that the majority of society holds one view on a topic, those who hold minority opinions are cowed into a “spiral of silence” for fear of reprisal or isolation from those in the majority. Since Noelle-Neumann introduced the Spiral of Silence, many studies have confirmed her theory. In fact, some scholars have discovered that her theory seems even more accurate when applied to the Internet than television alone. Whether Mr. Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, has knowingly leveraged the Spiral of Silence phenomenon is unclear. However, with more than willing accomplices in the liberal mainstream media, Mr. Obama has ridden a mediated tidal wave of support through the jaw-dropping imbalance of positive news coverage his campaign has received. If the Spiral of Silence thesis is accurate, this means that the lopsided liberal coverage—not Mr. Obama’s race—will have been responsible for silencing support for Senator McCain in national polls. Compounding the Spiral of Silence phenomenon are the ever-popular “poll of polls” that have emerged this presidential cycle more than in elections past. Indeed, every day journalists and columnists cite in their stories these aggregate poll ratings. Yet most serious public opinion scholars believe that there are real methodological problems with averaging multiple poll results. As President Ronald Reagan’s pollster and chief political strategist, Dick Wirthlin, explains, “Averaging polls is kind of like sticking someone’s head in an oven and their legs in ice and then taking their temperature. ‘On average’, they are feeling just fine and at a normal body temperature. But their ‘average’ temperature does not accurately reflect their present reality.”  Obama's Spiral of Silence

The tight U.S. senate race in North Carolina between incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole and Democrat Kay Hagan has intensified with a new ad that Dole is airing statewide, accusing her challenger of accepting campaign contributions from an atheist group. Dole's campaign is hammering North Carolina State Senator Kay Hagan for attending a fundraiser on September 15, in Boston, Massachusetts, at the home of Woody Kaplan, an advisor to the Godless Americans Political Action Committee, a liberal Washington-based group whose goal is "mobilizing America's nonbelievers for political activism." Massachusetts Senator John Kerry also attended the event. The ad states: "A leader of the Godless Americans PAC recently held a secret fundraiser in Kay Hagan's honor…Godless Americans and Kay Hagan. She hid from cameras, took godless money. What did Hagan promise in return?"  Woman's voice: "There is no God." Dole campaign spokesman Hogan Gidley believes the ad is relevant because the Godless Americans PAC seeks to remove references to God in currency and the pledge of allegiance and to eliminate Christmas as a federal holiday – issues, he notes, that routinely turn up in courts. "If elected to the senate, our opponent would have to vote to confirm Supreme Court justices andfederal judges from the district court level and up," he explains. "And that's the battleground in which these kinds of arguments are fought." Gidley contends Hagan is not being truthful when she claims that she received no money from the Godless Americans and was not aware at the time that the fundraiser was being hosted by activists with the atheist group. "Kay Hagan goes to church. Kay Hagan teaches Sunday school. But that's what makes this so confusing," he adds. "The real question here is, 'Does Kay Hagan believe in the values of the Godless Americans PAC or does she put money above her principles?' Either way, it's not good for North Carolina."  In response to the ad, Kay Hagan issued a statement saying, "I'm absolutely appalled by Elizabeth Dole's vile tactics. This is politics of the worst kind, and I know it has been rejected by North Carolinians at every level. It is so unbecoming of a woman like Elizabeth Dole. This is a fabricated, pathetic ad." Reported by Jim Brown.

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