Political tidbits: Palin greets Meridor, checking out the face of Obama’s Fla. campaign (UPDATED)

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  • Sarah Palin meets with Israel Ambassador to the U.S. Sallai Meridor and tells him she looks “forward to … working with your Jewish agency,” according to the Associated Press. (Is that some kind of reference to his old position as head of JAFI?) UPDATE: Here’s Palin’s full quote, and she was talking about Meridor’s time at the Jewish Agency for Israel: “I look forward to hearing about your work with the Jewish Agency and all the plans that we have. We’ll be working together.”
  • Menachem Rosensaft charges the McCain-Palin campaign has resurrected McCarthyism, in the Huffington Post.
  • A Jewish Republican state legislator in Ohio is attacked by his opponent for his military service in Iraq. Bob Belovich is charging that Josh Mandel “abandoned voters,” according to Joel Mowbray at Townhall.com.
  • A phone banker for Obama tells the Huffington Post that she first tells Jewish voters that she understands their concerns about “voting for someone who is black” – and then finds Sarah Palin “is a great help in persuading” them to back Obama.
  • The Sarasota Herald-Tribune profiles “Florida’s face for the Obama campaign,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz –and quotes her former professor predicting she’ll be the first Jewish president.
  • Friends of Israel should vote for Barack Obama, writes Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) in the Jerusalem Post.
  • The Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick writes that the prospect of an Obama-Tzipi Livni partnership is “enough to keep men and women of good faith up at night.”
  • Delray Beach deli Poppie’s is the setting for today’s interviews of South Florida Jewish voters – who, just as the polls indicate, seem to be swinging towards Obama, according to the Toronto Star.
  • Remember Cynthia McKinney, the congresswoman from Georgia whose father blames the “J-E-W-S” for her defeat in 2002? She’s running for president on the Green Party ticket, and is still talking about conspiracies, according to the Washington Post. She also got the endorsement of Roseanne Barr.
  • Bradley Burston, in Haaretz, wants Sarah Palin to speak to liberals like they were “real Americans” too.
  • The Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader talks to some Palin supporters from Oklahoma who think the vice presidential nominee is the “Deborah and Esther of our day” chosen “to defeat the modern enemy – Obama.”
  • Jim Besser in The Jewish Week explores the reasons for the rise in Obama’s Jewish numbers.
  • Rep. Robert Wexler tells the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne that McCain’s choice of Palin was an “unqualified negative” for the Republican in South Florida.
  • There’s always a lot of criticism about the substance of American political campaigns, but YNet’s Yair Lapid is jealous while watching McCain and Obama – because Israeli political campaign are much less serious.
  • Former Ehud Barak adviser Daniel Levy discusses what the 25th anniversary of the Hezbollah bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut can tell us about the presidential candidates.
  • The Washington Post looks at who is behind the distribution of 28 million copies of the anti-radical Islam film “Obsession.”
  • John McCain is favored by a 12-point margin over Obama by Israelis, according to YNet.

  • The New York Times endorses the “blind rabbi,” Dennis Shulman.

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