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Barack Obama and former Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton sought together Monday to swing this state to blue, mocking the Republican ticket by saying the election’s theme should be “jobs, baby, jobs” for people hurting in a nearly unprecedented economic crisis.

It was the first time the bitter opponents from the Democratic primaries have appeared together since a pair of fundraisers in early July. Those were understated affairs compared to the wild, sign-waving, overflow crowd of more than 50,000 people that gathered outside a sports arena to see them side-by-side as the sun set.

Clinton, sharing nearly equal billing with the man who beat her for the Democratic presidential nomination, got the “jobs, baby, jobs” train going by saying that the “drill, baby, drill” chant that is popular in speeches and crowds at events for Republican John McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, misses people’s real concerns.

Later, as Obama spoke, he picked it up at his audience’s urging. “Jobs, baby, jobs — you like that don’t you?” he said to cheers.

With just over two weeks left until Election Day, Obama is setting aside two full days to campaign across Florida, which twice went for Republican George W. Bush and now figures prominently in the Democrat’s hopes for clinching the presidency.

Obama’s swing was timed to coincide with Monday’s opening of early voting statewide.

He brought potent weapons, Clinton foremost among them. But Obama’s wife, Michelle, and another former Obama rival for the Democratic nomination, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, also were holding their own campaign schedules around Florida at the same time.

In Orlando, there were signs of Clinton’s gracious dedication to getting Obama elected, along with some evidence of the awkwardness that still lingers after their long- and hard-fought primary rivalry.

Clinton met Obama’s plane at the airport and boarded it, so that the smiling, waving pair could descend the stairs together in a show of unity designed for the cameras. But they then quickly split, riding to the event in separate cars.

Clinton’s 15-minute address focused more on the importance of ending Republican dominance of the White House than about the specifics of her support for Obama. She campaigned mostly to fire up the crowd, urging them to get out the vote, especially now, as Florida’s early voting ends Nov. 1. Earlier Monday, Clinton drew about 600 people to a rally in Fort Lauderdale where she barely mentioned Obama but spoke passionately about a Democratic win.

“Now is the time to close the deal for Barack Obama and close the book on eight years of failed Republican leadership,” she said at Obama’s side. “America will once again rise from the ashes of the Bushes.”

Clinton aides say she has done 65 events for Obama, including public events like rallies or town halls but also behind-the-scenes duties such as conference calls and fundraising. In Florida this week, she is headlining two other events on her own, besides the joint one with Obama.

Obama paid tribute to his supporter, opening his remarks by giving a paen to her accomplishments and leading the crowd in a “Hillary, Hillary” chant.

Obama had been unable to reduce McCain’s solid lead in Florida polls, despite far outspending and outstaffing his opponent. But since the housing crisis spread recently into a broader financial meltdown, Florida — like other key states — has started looking better for him.

In a sign of the importance of Florida, Obama’s campaign has parked deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand here. Winning the state’s 27 electoral votes could ease Obama’s path to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

And the campaign has decided that persuading Democrats to vote early is key.

Earlier in the day in Tampa, Obama noted that anything can happen on Nov. 4 — cars breaking down, emergencies at work — that can keep even a determined voter from the polls. What he didn’t say was that anything can happen between now and Election Day in a heated White House race, and that his campaign wants to capitalize on its current momentum.

Obama’s Florida director, Steve Schale, said as many as 40 percent of voters in the state could turn out early; the state has 11.2 million registered voters. The more the better for the campaign, which has identified a total of 1 million people in two demographic categories considered ripe for Obama’s message, black voters and white or Hispanic independents under age 30, who are now registered but did not vote in 2004, Schale said.

Obama also took careful note of Florida’s precarious economic situation. The state has higher unemployment than the national average and one of the worst foreclosure rates. So he touted his plan for a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures and for giving bankruptcy judges authority to reduce the interest rates or amount owed on a mortgage for a primary home.

He planned to hammer home that message some more in a round-table discussion of his economic plan on Tuesday in Lake Worth, Fla., featuring governors from states key to the election — Michigan, Ohio, New Mexico and Colorado. All the governors are Democrats, but all four states except Michigan voted for Bush in 2004.

In Tampa, Obama was introduced by half a dozen baseball players from the Tampa Bay Rays, who dethroned the defending champion Boston Red Sox Sunday night to clinch the American League pennant and earn a spot in the World Series.

The crowd went almost as wild for them as for Obama. “Tampa Bay! Tampa Bay!” the audience screamed as the players waved from the stage at Legend’s Field, the spring training home of the New York Yankees.

“When you see a (Chicago) White Sox fan showing some love to the Rays, and the Rays showing some love back, you know we’re on to something right here,” said the Illinois senator.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has left the wilds of Alaska, but she hasn’t quite left the mountains.

In her first cautious steps on the campaign trail without running mate John McCain, the Alaska governor is making a brief swing through the West. It’s a region the campaign believes will be particularly receptive to Palin’s Washington-outsider message and outdoorsy persona.

It’s also a place poised to swing the election.

In her first solo stump speech in the lower 48 states on Saturday, Palin addressed a cheering crowd in Carson City, Nev., in a roller hockey rink in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains. She joked easily about hockey moms, the air show in town and her husband’s Piper Cub plane, an outdoorsman’s favorite that sits on the lake outside her Wasilla home.

The next stop was Colorado, where Palin planned a rally Monday at an indoor riding center in the Denver suburbs.

These are places full of voters who need no explanation on the nuanced difference between a hockey mom and a soccer mom. For some here, Palin’s love of moose hunting isn’t an exotic quirk. It’s a shared hobby. More than 600,000 Coloradans have fishing or hunting licenses.

In naming the first-term governor as his running mate, McCain, an Arizona senator, gave Republicans an all-Western ticket in a year when Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and to a lesser degree Montana, are in play. It’s a double billing that has allowed the Republicans to try to draw a sharp contrast with the Democrats in the race.

Neither Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois nor Joe Biden of Delaware have obvious ties to the interior West, and Obama’s Hawaii has little in common. Neither Democrat has made many attempt to play to the images Western voters have historically responded to. Almost no hats, no boots, no hunting. Yet.

That may be because McCain himself hasn’t fully cultivated his cowboy image. More than 25 years in Congress and an upbringing on military bases hasn’t helped, said Tom Cronin, a political science professor at Colorado College.

“He is really a creature of being a Navy brat and a Washington, D.C., guy. He doesn’t strike most people as a Westerner,” Cronin said.

A fishing enthusiast married to a champion snowmobiler racer, there is no doubt Palin is a creature of the big skies and open spaces. She hails from about as far outside the Beltway as a politician can get. She regularly expounds standard messages of self-reliance, lower taxes and government reform, themes that jibe easily with the Western libertarian streak.

“I reminded people there that government is not always the answer, in fact, too often government is the problem,” Palin said Saturday of her work in Alaska. “So, we’ve got back to basics.”

Republicans have wasted little time casting Obama and Biden as city slickers, unfamiliar with public land and water issues.

“There’s a very big contrast between these two tickets. One is a couple of senators from the big cities in the East Coast and one that is much more in line with the West,” said New Mexico Rep. Heather Wilson told reporters this week, misplacing Obama’s home. “I kind of wonder whether the guy from Chicago and the guy from Delaware even know what a grazing permit is or how to get one or have even been in a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) office.”

Republicans and their allies have begun describing Obama-Biden as “antigun.” The National Rifle Association sent a flier to 4 million members this week saying Obama would be “the most antigun president in American history.”

The Obama campaign strongly refutes such claims and argues McCain is the one out of touch with the pressing issues in the West.

They point to McCain’s gaffe in which he appeared to advocate renegotiating the Colorado River Compact, a position far out of step with both Democrats and Republicans in the seven Western states that rely on the river for water. McCain has since said he does not want to renegotiate the compact.

Obama aides also note that McCain has advocated storing nuclear waste in Nevada, an unpopular position in the state.

“On Western issues, Barack Obama has positions that are light-years ahead of John McCain,” said Jim Messina, Obama campaign chief of staff. “This election isn’t about swagger. This election is about substance and who can bring about change.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton closed the book on her 2008 presidential bid with an emphatic plea for the party to unite behind Barack Obama.

Now the Democratic convention spotlight turns to her husband, as former President Bill Clinton takes to the prime-time television stage Wednesday evening. He is expected to launch attacks on the Republican’s presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, and on the Bush administration.

Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, Obama’s choice as a running mate, will get prime-time exposure as well.

Hillary Clinton, who won 18 million votes but still failed to earn her party’s nomination, planned to meet with delegates who still want to cast ballots for her during the nominating roll call Wednesday evening — a symbolic move before Obama is nominated, presumably by acclamation. Clinton has not indicated whether she would have her name placed in nomination or seek a formal roll call vote.

Clinton’s aides said it remained unclear how exactly the meeting with the delegates would play out, or how her supporters will react.

“It’s not Hillary’s job to bring this party together,” said Jennie Lou Leeder, a Clinton delegate from Llado, Texas. “It’s Barack Obama’s job to bring this party together.”

It’s the kind of talk that Clinton tried to discourage. “I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me?” she said Tuesday night in her convention speech, addressing her supporters.

Clinton used her prime-time convention appearance to try to silence infighting over how to honor Clinton’s campaign without distracting from Obama’s upcoming contest against McCain.

“Barack Obama is my candidate, and he must be our president,” she said.

Even so, bringing the Democratic Party together is going to take more than a single speech. The best unifier among Democrats going into the final sprint might just be McCain.

“Arizonans are also proud of their political tradition, from Barry Goldwater to Mo Udall to Bruce Babbitt. There’s a pattern here,” Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano told delegates Tuesday as part of the chorus eviscerating McCain. Goldwater, Udall and Babbitt all sought the presidency; none succeeded.

“Speaking for myself, and for at least this coming election, this is one Arizona tradition I’d like to see continue,” Napolitano said.

Republicans, meanwhile, struggled for a bit of the spotlight. McCain has been airing commercials quoting critical comments from Obama’s former rivals. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a potential running mate for McCain, came to Denver and said, “Barack Obama is a charming and fine person with a lovely family, but he’s not ready to be president.”

Bill Clinton, whose reputation took some hits during the primary season, stayed away from his wife and daughter Chelsea — who introduced her mother on stage Tuesday evening. Instead, he watched his wife’s speech from convention floor box seats.

“She was great,” Clinton told The Associated Press as he left the convention hall. “Weren’t you proud of her?”

Obama, 47, formally receives the nomination Wednesday. He delivers his acceptance speech Thursday night at a football stadium. An estimated 75,000 tickets have been distributed for the event, meant to stir comparisons with John F. Kennedy’s appearance at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1960.

McCain and his yet-unnamed vice presidential pick are scheduled to receive their formal nomination at the Republican convention in Minneapolis next week.

Tributes from political allies and even one-time enemies came pouring in for Democratic U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a trailblazer whose energy and outspokenness made her one of Congress’ most dynamic leaders.

Tubbs Jones, the first black woman to represent Ohio in Congress, died Wednesday evening after suffering a brain hemorrhage caused by a ruptured aneurysm. She was 58.

“She poured her heart and soul into her job,” said U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. “She worked so hard and gave everything she could. I’m devastated. Wherever we’d go, we’d speak of each other as brother and sister. It’s an incalculable loss.”

Tubbs Jones represented Ohio’s heavily Democratic 11th District for five terms. She was the first black woman to serve on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and the first to serve as a common pleas judge in Ohio.

The congresswoman suffered the hemorrhage while driving her car in suburban Cleveland Heights on Tuesday night. She had been driving erratically and her vehicle crossed lanes of traffic before coming to a stop, police said. An officer found her.

An aneurysm is a dangerous weakness or bulge in a blood vessel that can leak or rupture, causing bleeding. In Tubbs Jones, the aneurysm burst in an inaccessible part of her brain, said Dr. Gus Kious, president of Huron Hospital in East Cleveland where Tubbs Jones died. Several news organizations, including The Associated Press, incorrectly announced her death about four hours before she died.

Tubbs Jones, who chaired the House Ethics Committee, was a passionate opponent of the war in Iraq, voting in 2002 against authorizing the use of military force. Just as the war was starting in March 2003, she was one of only 11 House members to oppose a resolution supporting U.S. troops in Iraq.

“I am going to miss her as a friend and colleague, and her leadership will most certainly be missed by her constituents, northeast Ohio and the state as a whole,” said Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio.

She was one of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s biggest boosters during the primaries and was to have been a superdelegate at next week’s Democratic National Convention in Denver.

She switched her backing to Sen. Barack Obama in June, but said he could not win unless Clinton’s supporters rallied behind him. She also said Obama should consider Clinton as a running mate.

The Clinton family released a statement saying Tubbs Jones was a “one-woman force for progress in our country” and that they shared a friendship with her that “deepened through every trial and challenge.”

“Over the course of many years, with many ups and many downs, Stephanie was right by our side — unwavering, indefatigable,” the statement said.

Obama called Tubbs Jones “an extraordinary American and an outstanding public servant.”

“It wasn’t enough for her just to break barriers in her own life. She was also determined to bring opportunity to all those who had been overlooked and left behind — and in Stephanie, they had a fearless friend and unyielding advocate,” Obama said in a statement.

On the Ways and Means Committee, Tubbs Jones opposed President Bush’s tax cuts and his efforts to create personal accounts within Social Security. In 2005, she opposed certifying his re-election because of questionable electoral results in her home state.

“She was an effective legislator who was dedicated to helping small businesses, improving local schools, expanding job opportunities for Ohioans, and ensuring that more of them have access to health care,” Bush said Wednesday. “Our nation is grateful for her service.”

Tubbs Jones grew up in a working-class area of Cleveland, the youngest of three girls. Her father, Andrew Tubbs, was a skycap for United Airlines at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. Her mother, Mary, was a homemaker and later a factory worker.

Tubbs Jones studied sociology at Case Western Reserve University on a full scholarship that she attributed to affirmative action efforts.

After graduating, she worked for the city sewer district and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Tubbs Jones also served as a Cuyahoga County Common Pleas judge and prosecutor before running for political office.

Former U.S. Rep. Louis Stokes made Tubbs Jones his hand-picked successor in 1998.

“I wanted somebody whom I felt could carry on what I tried to do for 30 years in that congressional district,” Stokes said. “She did it. She took it to a higher level, a new level. She made me so proud.”

The U.S. presidential election presents a sharp contrast between two types of patriotism: John McCain stands as a war hero. His rival Barack Obama calls Americans back to the can-do spirit of the nation’s founders.In November the candidates will find out which style appealed more to voters in this time of war and economic uncertainty.

Unlike other democratic countries, patriotism, though a fuzzy concept, plays powerfully in U.S. elections, when Americans are often reminded of their country’s revolutionary roots and politicians tap into a sense of national pride.

Democratic candidate Obama has made patriotism a core theme of his campaign, seeking to inspire voters to overcome divisions of race and party and using his own story as a child of a Kenyan father and Kansas mother as an example of opportunities available only in America.

But on the campaign trail, audiences also applaud Republican McCain’s tales of his experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam which embody qualities he seeks to project as a candidate.

As a Navy pilot, McCain was shot down over Hanoi in 1967. He was stabbed, beaten, tortured and imprisoned for more than five years, including two years in solitary confinement.

The appeal of that biography, encapsulating triumph over adversity while serving one’s country, was apparent on Saturday in televised interviews with each candidate by a leading pastor, Rick Warren, at his megachurch in California.

Asked to describe the hardest decision he ever made, Obama talked about his decision to oppose the Iraq war.

McCain recounted how he decided to refuse early repatriation from a Hanoi prison even though he was injured, because he did not want to jump the line — a story that visibly resonated with the audience.

Nothing in Obama’s life story can match those experiences and they reinforce McCain’s slogan of “Country First,” said Richard Kohn, professor of history at the University of North Carolina.

“For McCain, not only does it (patriotism) arise from his very being, his identity, but it plays a dual role of emphasizing a national security part of the campaign and the contrast between him and Obama,” he said.

McCain retired from the Navy in 1981 and entered politics. He stresses his war years in questioning Obama’s foreign policy credentials and readiness to be commander-in-chief.

For his part, Obama praises McCain’s patriotic service but has made unswerving opposition to the Iraq war a pillar of his campaign and vows to pull U.S. combat troops out of Iraq.

“SUSPICION”

Obama grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, an island far from the U.S. mainland. As a result, he could be vulnerable to the charge that his background and values are unfamiliar.

One possible method of exploiting this emerged last week in a memo by campaign strategist Mark Penn for one-time Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton, which suggested she could defeat Obama by running an explicitly patriotic campaign.

Obama should be presented as someone not “fundamentally American,” said the memo in advice Clinton did not adopt.

In an apparent bid to overcome any skepticism about his background and values, the Democratic party will showcase Obama’s life story at its convention in Denver next week, starting with a speech by his wife Michelle on opening night.

“He’s going to demonstrate love of country by word and deed at the convention,” said Democratic strategist Mark Mellman.

“It’s not something that you repeat: ‘I am patriot’. There are no specific patriotic activities. It’s got to come across at an authentic and sincere way,” Mellman said.

Obama would be the country’s first black president and as such faces an extra hurdle as he attempts to persuade voters.

“There is a historic suspicion that African Americans are less patriotic,” Kohn said.

Black Americans have fought in all the country’s wars but their loyalty has been questioned because many black leaders have criticized U.S. policies on race and some whites assume historic discrimination against them, which includes slavery, would have undermined their commitment to U.S. ideals.

“Conservative whites look at them (blacks) as unpatriotic and yet if you look at the constitution and the history, the black community has been trying to make that constitution work for everybody,” said Ronald Walters, professor of politics and government at the University of Maryland.

Walters contrasted what he called “bumper sticker patriotism” with what he said was a struggle many African Americans had engaged in to make the country a real democracy.

Nowhere is McCain’s war hero status shown more clearly than in his bond with military veterans, a group held in higher public esteem in the United States than in most other Western countries.

But Peter Melendez, a combat instructor recently retired from the U.S. army after 22 years, said that even for veterans McCain’s status should not necessarily be a decisive factor.

“He has been in combat and I have been in combat but just because he is a military man running for office doesn’t mean he has the right to run the country,” Melendez said.

Zimbabwe’s rival parties were likely to miss Monday’s deadline to conclude power-sharing talks, a South African official said, as the two sides met for negotiations over the country’s crisis.

Discussions would likely stretch several days beyond the two-week deadline set by Zimbabwe’s ruling party and opposition, said Mukoni Ratshitanga, spokesman for South African President Thabo Mbeki, who has mediated the talks.

“The talks were on today (Monday) after they resumed on Sunday,” he said.

“We should take note of the fact that the parties took five days off last week to discuss with their principals. So, logically there is no way they will meet their original deadline if you take that into consideration.”

Talks resumed in a secret location in South Africa on Sunday after a nearly week-long pause to allow negotiators to return home and consult with their leaders.

The discussions broke up Tuesday amid suggestions from the opposition that the two sides were deadlocked in their bid to resolve the crisis that intensified after President Robert Mugabe’s one-man election in June.

Mugabe, opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai and the head of an MDC splinter branch, Arthur Mutambara, agreed on July 21 to a framework for negotiations, including the two-week deadline.

Tsvangirai has also signaled the talks would extend beyond Monday, saying last week the timeframe was “not inflexible”.

Mbeki, who has faced heavy criticism in the past over accusations of treating the Zimbabwe president with kid gloves, flew to Harare for talks with Mugabe after the adjournment last week and also met Tsvangirai in Pretoria.

The Star newspaper in South Africa reported Monday that Mbeki was to return to Zimbabwe for meetings with the two leaders this week, but Ratshitanga said he was not aware of it.

Tsvangirai finished ahead of Mugabe in the March first round of the presidential election, but boycotted the run-off, citing rising violence against his supporters that left dozens dead and thousands injured.

He announced his withdrawal five days ahead of the June 27 poll, and Mugabe pushed ahead with the vote despite widespread calls to postpone it, handing himself a sixth term as president.

Tsvangirai believes his first-round total gives him the right to the lion’s share of power, but sources in his party said recently Mugabe’s negotiators had so far only offered him one of several vice presidential posts.

1. Absolutely!!

2. No. The President needs to be intelligent and powerful enough not to be a puppet.

3. Nope.

4. Oh my god no. She is the freakiest person I ever heard of. She makes absolutely no sense when she talks. She speaks in that government speak and does not make any sense. Have I mentioned she makes no sense?

5. Possibly, a black woman being president would be GREAT, but I don’t think there’s a chance she would ever run. She does seem to agree with EVERYTHING Bush does, other than that I think she could handle the job.

6. From what I have seen of her, I would seriously consider her as a viable candidate.

7. I would sooner vote for Condie than for Hillary

8. Helllllllllllllllllllllll Nooooooooooooooooooo!

9. It depends on who she ran against but she is definitely very highly regarded by me.

10. nope…no way …not a frig’n shot, she’s as bad as bush and darth cheney

11. Possibly, yes. IMHO, she’s the most qualified woman in America. However, she has never held an elected position in government. I say that she’d be a good VP running mate for the republican party … that would get Hillary’s and the democrat party’s panties in a bunch!

12. I would vote for her before I would Hillary Clinton. And with the way she handling foreign relations and the mid-eastern peace talks I think she would make a good president.

13. Maybe, depend on the other choice

14. She was so weak as the national security adviser and the Secretary of state that Donald Rumsfeld and the defense department bullied their way in to dictating what state department policy should be.

She would be a weak president.

15. depends on her stances and ideals, but i wouldn’t out right rule it out.

16. You bet. It’s nice to have a leader with class. And she’s tough and is a good speaker.

Joey, what a great idea!

17. No, since I never voted for her in anything in the first place. I want to know who the People get to nominate? All we get is a premade selection of choices that I would never make in the first place.

Attorneys choose jurors by using a system known as voir dire. This is where each side of a case has the opportunity to ask questions of the jurors to determine who would not be suited to serve on this case due to underlying biases. This is where the differences between federal and state court arise. In federal court, the judge is the one who generally conducts voir dire. the attorneys submit questions to the judge who will ask the questions to the jurors. In state court, generally each attorney is permitted to ask questions to the jurors in an alloted time period. At the end of voir dire, the attorneys are permitted to use for cause challenges to get rid of the jurors from the jury pool who would be tainted from delivering a verdict. This means for example if it is a murder case, juror fourteen’s sister was murdered. This juror would be struck for cause because it would be hard for this juror to think about this murder case differently than they would think about their own sister’s murder case. Then each side has an opportunity to exercise their preemptory challenges to get rid of a juror. This is where Batson challenges can arise. It is pretty complicated going into the ins and outs of jury selection but this is a bare bones summary.