According to a Rasmussen Reports poll, Sen. John McCain maintains a comfortable lead over Sen. Barack Obama in Arkansas.  The poll indicates that McCain has shored up his base; 91% of Republicans say they favor him.  Obama is still struggling to get the support of Democrats; only 67% of Democrats say they planned to vote for him.  16% of Democrats prefer McCain.  Hilly Clinton sour sports?  Surely not in Arkansas.

Race will certainly prove to be a factor.  McCain leads among whites 55% - 27%.  Obama leads among African-Americans 93% - 2%.  McCain leads among men 52% - 33% and the candidates are even among women.

45% of Arkansans say the economy is the most important issue in the election.  President Bush has a 34% approval in Arkansas, higher than the rest of the country.

Netroots Nation, formerly YearlyKos Convention started by dailykos.com founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, kicks off today in Austin, Texas.  According to Katherine Q. Seelye of the New York Times, “The convention, formerly YearlyKos and now Netroots Nation, or NN08, bills itself as “the most concentrated gathering of progressive bloggers to date.” About 2,000 bloggers, activists, office-holders, vendors and others are expected to attend, with 200 members of the mainstream media tracking them (yes, roughly one old-media type for every 10 new-media hipsters.).”

Here’s the full agenda that includes several panels from representatives of Barack Obama’s campaign.

Barack Obama’s campaign reported raising $52 million in the month of June, the second highest one-month total in history. Campaign manager David Plouffe stated that the campaign has $72 million cash on hand. And while fundraising has been sluggish for John McCain, the Republican National Committee has a lot of cash. The McCain campaign reports that combined the two entites have $93 million in the bank. Said Plouffe, “McCain and the RNC together still have a huge cash advantage.”

UPDATE: Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post puts Obama’s fundraising numbers into current and historical context.  It’s worth a read.

I’ve been posting current state poll numbers as I receive them.  But for those of you that are getting anxious and want to know which states will really make a difference in the 2008 presidential election, Stuart Rothenberg has a list for you.  He’s narrowed it to five: Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, Ohio and Michigan.

In response to an earlier Rothenberg column in which he suggested the electoral map wouldn’t change all that map, I took a look at the map and offered my own views.

Thank you to the readers of the Arkansas Times who voted in the annual “Best of Arkansas” readers poll.  This blog was recognized as a runner up for Best Local Blog behind the Times own “Arkansas Blog,” which took home the winning prize.

Thanks for voting and thanks for reading.

“Open Book: Writers on Writing” is a collaboration between Slate and the Creative Writing Program in the School of Arts & Science at New York University. In the first episode, NYU’s Deborah Landau and Slate’s Meghan O’Rourke sit down with Junot Díaz, who recently won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

NORTH CAROLINA
McCain - 50%
Obama - 45%
Source: SurveyUSA

OREGON
Obama - 49%
McCain - 40%
Source: Rasmussen

CALIFORNIA
Obama - 54%
McCain - 30%
Source: The Field Poll

I was very pleased to hear about the in-kind gift from Deltic Timber and KATV that will allow two public radio stations, KUAR-FM 89 and KLRE-FM 90.5, to broadcast from the 500-foot mark of 1,150 foot tower on Shinall Mountain in Little Rock.  “You won’t find many agreements like this between a commercial broadcaster and a public radio operation,” said Ben Fry, general manager of KUAR and KLRE.  The gift is valued at $2.7 million.

I’m not a huge fan of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game.  I’m generally less of a fan of the Home Run Derby which drags on way too long.  That said, I found myself flipping channels last night and in a bit of luck I was able to watch Josh Hamilton launch 28 home runs in the first round, a record.  It was an amazing feat and a lot of fun to watch.

Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times has a column today about Hamilton and how he turned his life around after drug and alcohol problems forced him out of baseball for three years.

IOWA
Obama - 51%
McCain - 41%
Source: Rasmussen

MINNESOTA
Obama - 54%
McCain - 37%
Source: Rasmussen

SOUTH DAKOTA
McCain - 47%
Obama - 43%
Source: Rasmussen

There has been a lot of conversation this morning on MSNBC about this week’s cover of The New Yorker magazine. Pictured below, it depicts Barack Obama wearing a turban and Michelle Obama holding an AK-47 assault rifle. An American flag burns in the fireplace.

Hendrik Hertzberg of the magazine appeared on MSNBC this morning and said the cover was an attempt to convey the absured rhetoric during this campaign that Obama was a muslim and that somehow they were connected with terrorists. But because The New Yorker never ties its cover to a feature story inside the magazine, there’s no explanation of this.

“The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” the spokesman, Bill Burton, said in a statement. “But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive –- and we agree.”

Here’s an interview magazine editor David Remnick conducted with the Huffington Post.

UPDATE: Jack Shafer of Slate writes, “Only weak thinkers fear strong images.”  The lead editorial in the Los Angeles Times opines, “Let’s be frank. People sophisticated enough to read, say, newspaper editorials are smart enough to know that the New Yorker’s cover art this week — portraying Barack Obama as a be-turbaned Muslim and wife Michelle as an Afro-sporting terrorist with an AK-47 across her back — is a work of satire. But what about the millions of dumb Americans who will think otherwise?”

Earier this year I read New York Times reporter Matt Bai’s book entitiled “Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake the Democratic Party.”  In his book, Bai explores the raise of a vocal online political community led, in part, by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong of dailykos.com and MyDD.com respectively.  This weekend, a blog convention known as Netroots Nation (formerly known as YearlyKos Convention) will convene in Austin, Texas.  Most people are still trying to determine just how (depending on your political perspective) how helpful or harmful the left-leaning netroots can be.

I raise this because over the past two weeks there has been a lot of chatter online about Barack Obama’s position over the Foreign Service Intelligence Act.  The what? you ask.  Exactly.  Anyway, Obama’s apparent support for the Act (which, admittedly, raises some questions over warrantless wiretapping and privacy) got the so-called netroots all kinds of fired up.

Kristen Powers of the New York Post has a funny piece about this.  She writes, “One top liberal blogger opined last week that Obama’s drop in a recent Newsweek poll resulted from his vote for a compromise on FISA, the intelligence surveillance law.  Ridiculous: The average American voter can’t describe what FISA is.”

Obama’s website has been flooded with comments.  For a week, I received e-mails asking my thoughts about this issue.  My first thought: it’s summer and people are bored.  My second thought: no one cares except a small minority.  My third thought: it’s not a voting issue.

Powers sums the issue up nicely: “Newsflash to the netroots and the media (which seems perpetually confused on this issue): The netroots are not the base of the Democratic Party. Overwhelmingly white, male and highly educated, they’re a loud anomaly in a party that’s wholly dependent on the votes of African Americans, women and working-class whites. And every poll in existence confirms that what the folks in the party’s actual base care about is the economy and the Iraq war. It’s high gas prices, not electronic snooping, that have most Americans on edge.”

“In a statement timed to precede the opening of Asian markets Monday, as well as a closely watched auction of debt by Freddie, the Treasury said it plans to seek approval from Congress for a temporary increase in a longstanding Treasury line of credit for the two companies. The Treasury also said it would seek temporary authority so that it could buy equity in either company “if needed” to ensure they have “sufficient capital to continue to serve their mission” of providing a steady flow of money into home mortgages. The plan, which requires congressional approval, also calls for a provision to give the Federal Reserve a “consultative role” in the process of setting capital requirements and other “prudential standards” for Fannie and Freddie,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

Last week I wrote a post suggesting that Bob Barr’s presence as an indepdendent candidate for president might be enough for Barack Obama to pick former senator Sam Nunn as his running mate.

Today, John Brummett of Arkansas News Bureau has a column also suggesting that Nunn could make the ticket.