From CBS:

Some of the questioners said they were scared of an Obama presidency, and one woman said she couldn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab.”

McCain shook his head. “No ma’am, he’s a decent family man, a citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

Now that both campaigns have signed on, we've focused the call for open debates to try to get some real progress. The new letter is below. Meanwhile, please sign up below to support the call for "open debates." (The original letter to McCain and Obama is here.)

Ikeda-san reports two bits of very good news from Japan:

On Sep. 18, the Council of Culture gave up the extension of copyright from 50 years after the death of the author to 70 years. Two years ago, the Council proposed the extension to follow the "global standard", but many people on the Web objected against the legislation.

Last week the Council of Information and Communication decided to scrap the B-CAS, the notorious conditional access system for free broadcasting. Due to this change, "Dubbing Ten", which forbids copying the programs of digital broadcasting more than ten times, would be abolished, because it is enforced by the encryption of B-CAS.

Read more on his blog.

If you've not become a reader of factcheck.org, you should. They work too hard, in my biased view, to present flaws on both sides. But that's a virtuous sin in such an organization. It's review of the VP debates is great.

Barack Obama has reaffirmed the position he took in the primaries and asked the Debate Commission to support "open debates." Here's the letter.

Three key open questions:

1) Will the media pool choose to put their video of the debates in the public domain, so folks can freely blog key moments and share them without fear of being deemed a lawbreaker?

2) Will Tom Brokaw use some bottom-up debate questions collected and voted on on Google's site, in addition or in place of the top-down ones the Commission collected?

3) Will the Commission adopt these principles for future debates, now that the candidates from both major parties embrace them?

And one final point: Now that both Senators have affirmed the "open debate" principles, its time for citizens to do the same. Please sign up below to support the call for "open debates." Once again, the original letter to McCain and Obama is here.