Presidential Election 2008:
▪  In today's Spokesman-review -- Health care issue favors Obama (Harrop op-ed) -- Independents are the key to victory in this election. Their opinions matter. And asked which candidate best represents their views on health care, 40% say Obama; 25% say McCain.
▪  In today's LA Times -- Obama looks to "better days ahead" -- National despair over the foundering economy has given new resonance to Sen. Barack Obama's message of hope. 
▪  In today's LA Times -- McCain campaign ratchets up the rhetoric -- With the presidential race winding down and McCain trailing in the polls, he has gotten more personal in its attacks on Barack Obama.
▪  In today's NY Times -- Taxpayers, not lenders, would bear costs of McCain's mortgage proposal -- McCain says it would be expensive and his advisers acknowledge the liability would be borne directly by taxpayers. Obama: “The biggest beneficiaries of this plan will be the same financial institutions that got us into this mess, some of whom even committed fraud.”
▪  At the Huffington Post -- Joe Six-Pack demands answers from anti-union McCain & Co. (USW President Leo Gerard) -- McCain is a hypocrite on the issue of unionization. He previously condemned unions as "serious excesses" and said government workers are "crippled by the fine print of the latest union contract." Now he introduces Palin by bragging about her union background -- as if he approved. "The person I am about to introduce to you," he said, "was a union member and is married to a union member."
▪  In today's Seattle P-I -- Consider McCain's health as well as his age (op-ed by a physician) -- McCain has never fully released his medical records though this is standard practice for presidential candidates. He has had four bouts with melanoma, a potentially deadly form of skin cancer.

Will your vote be counted?
▪  In today's NY Times -- State's actions to purge voter rolls appear to be illegal -- Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law. The screening or trimming of voter registration lists could result in problems at the polls on Election Day: people who have been removed from the rolls are likely to show up only to be challenged by political party officials or election workers, resulting in confusion, long lines and heated tempers.
▪  In today's NY Times -- That's a pretty big glitch (editorial) -- Hardly an election goes by without reports of serious vulnerabilities or malfunctions in electronic voting. There is no time left between now and Election Day for states and localities to upgrade their machines or fix the vote-dropping software. All they can do is double-check their vote totals, audit their paper trails and be on the lookout for the next, as-yet-undiscovered computer glitch.

Local news:
▪  From AP -- State agrees to check farmworkers' papers -- State officials say they have agreed to screen potential farm hands for immigration violations before referring them to jobs, after the feds threatened to cut millions of dollars from a program that matches workers with jobs. However, officials say they still won't use a federal verification system to confirm their documents are valid.
▪  In today's Yakima H-R -- Farm worker receives settlement in insecticide-exposure case -- A Wenatchee farm worker has accepted a $53,500 settlement in a case against an orchard and its foreman over the worker’s exposure to a toxic insecticide;.
▪  In today's Oregonian -- The Columbian nears bankruptcy -- An expansion into a new $30 million office building has pushed the owner of Vancouver newspaper to the edge of bankruptcy.

National news: 
▪  In today's LA Times -- For insensitivity, Wachovia refuses to be outdone -- As ailing Wachovia Corp. waits to see whether taxpayers will pay the tab for hundreds of billions of dollars in bad loans, some of the company's top brokers are preparing to depart Saturday for an all-expenses-paid cruise of the Greek Isles.

As the nation’s financial woes deepen and local jobless numbers rise, a broad-based coalition of Washington business, labor, environmental and community leaders is releasing a bold plan to create more than 5 million new green-collar jobs across the United States -- thousands of them in Washington.

For a copy of The New Apollo Program, and more information on the Apollo Alliance, visit www.apolloalliance.org. For information on the Green Industrial & Career Expo, visit www.nwgreenexpo.org.