Political tidbits: Franken up by nine, Mason flip-flopped on McCain

Capital J

By Eric Fingerhut · October 6, 2008

Al Franken (D) leads Sen. Norm Coleman (R) by nine points in a new poll of voters in Minnesota, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The paper also has a report on the first debate of the campaign, held Sunday night.
On "Meet the Press"... Democratic strategist Paul Begala warns that the GOP's guilt-by-association reasoning could be turned on its head to make John McCain look like someone who has associated with anti-Semites.
Jackie Mason flip-flopped on McCain? The Miami New Times posts a video of the comedian calling John McCain a "disgusting lowlife" and a "fraud" during the Republican primaries, quite a contrast with his pro-McCain, anti-Sarah Silverman video released Friday.
Andrew Silow-Carroll, in the New Jersey Jewish News, decodes the presidential candidates' High Holiday messages – and finds that they encapsulate their strategies for winning the Jewish vote.
By the end of this campaign, every South Florida Jewish voter will have been interviewed at least once about the campaign. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel contributes with this article.
And Salon does its part, but with a fresher spin – it finds a lot of Florida Jews who really don't like Sarah Palin.
Palin said during the vice-presidential debate that she backed a Sudan divestment bill in Alaska, but the bill's Democratic sponsor says she was against it before she was for it, according to ABCNews.com.
And Joe Biden's statement that the U.S. and France "kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon" wasn't accurate either.
The Levin brothers, Carl and Sander, stump for Obama at a Bucks County, Pa. synagogue, reports the Bucks County Courier Times.
Menachem Rosensaft urges Jews to listen to Ed Koch and vote for Obama. Willy Stern, in the Weekly Standard, quotes a Palestinian pollster who says Palestinians aren't that optimistic about an Obama presidency.
Fox host Sean Hannity uses a source with a history of anti-Semitism to attack Obama, according to Todd Gitlin at TPMCafe.
The Jewish Council for Education and Research has released a video of seven former IDF generals and Mossad chiefs endorsing Barack Obama, but two of them say they had no idea their interviews were going to end up in a pro-Obama video, according to Haaretz.