By Michael Crawford
On Meet the Press moments ago Gen. Colin Powell crossed party lines to endorse Barack Obama for president. This is amazing and follows the Obama campaigns announcement of its fundraising totals for September.

David Plouffe, Barack’s campaign manager, reported the news to supporters via a special online video update. The average contribution was $86. The previous record was $66 million set by the Obama campaign in August. The total number of people that have contributed to the campaign is 3.1 million.

This news will undoubtedly make the McCain/Palin campaign and the GOP go apoplectic. They will unleash a wave of racist, xenophobic and slanderous attacks against Barack and Joe Biden unlike anything we have seen in recent presidential campaigns. Already McCain has hired three of the attack machine specialists who spread the lies and innuendo that sunk McCain’s presidential campaign in 2000. Among the lies they spread during the 2000 South Carolina primary was that the Bangladeshi child that McCain and his wife Cindy adopted was McCain’s illegitimate Black daughter. If they are were willing to go after a member of their own party like this, can you imagine the bile they are prepared to unload against Barack?

This makes it all the more important that for the next 16 days we do all that we can to ensure that Barack is elected our next president. The time for the viciousness of hyper-partisan Republican politics is over.