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In a sign of continued weakness in his home state, an online poll shows Sen. John McCain trailing Sen. Barack Obama by 3-percentage points in Arizona. The poll also shows the candidacy of Liberterian Bob Barr is having a significant impact on McCain's campaign by siphoning off conservative voters nationwide.

Colorado voters prefer Democratic Sen. Barack Obama over Republican Sen. John McCain for president by a five-point margin, a lead also found in three other swing states in a new poll released today. . .

[T]he poll also showed Democrat Mark Udall leading over Republican Bob Schaffer in the Senate race by a 10-point margin, with 12 percent of voters undecided.

Barack finally has his bounce. For weeks many political experts and pollsters have been wondering why the race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain had stayed so tight, even after the Illinois senator wrested the nomination from Hillary Clinton. With numbers consistently showing rock-bottom approval ratings for President Bush and a large majority of Americans unhappy with the country's direction, the opposing-party candidate should, in the normal course, have attracted more disaffected voters. Now it looks as if Obama is doing just that. A new NEWSWEEK Poll shows that he has a substantial double-digit lead, 51 percent to 36 percent, over McCain among registered voters nationwide.

Concerns about Barack Obama's ability to compete in the key swing states that have decided the last several elections are falling by the wayside, as a new poll Tuesday shows him ahead of Republican John McCain in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The founder of a nonprofit linked to Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bob Schaffer was convicted late Wednesday of defrauding the federal government in receiving $3.6 million in alternative-fuel research funds. . .

According to court records, Orr defrauded Congress into awarding a 2002 earmark to a nonprofit he founded for an Environmental Protection Agency grant to test an alternative fuel additive called “vapor phase combustion.”

More than $2 million of the revenue actually made it into the coffers of the nonprofit Orr founded in 2001, the National Alternative Fuels Foundation, to handle the EPA grant funds.

Schaffer, according to his Senate financial disclosure, was a member of the board of directors of the National Alternative Fuels Foundation from October 2004 to March 2005.

Schaffer’s tenure at the foundation, according to Orr’s 2006 indictment, overlaps with the time period Orr’s foundation was accepting the fraudulently obtained federal funds.

Dick Wadhams, Schaffer’s campaign manager, said Schaffer joined the nonprofit because he was interested in the development of alternative fuels, including those purportedly being developed by the foundation.

Wadhams said Schaffer left the firm as soon as he learned about the investigation. “

He was only on the board a little more than four months,” Wadhams said. “As soon as he found out the problems with Mr. Orr, he resigned from the board.”

Wadhams said Schaffer was not involved in securing the earmark for Orr when Schaffer was a member of Congress from 1997 to 2002.

Schaffer joined the board at the behest of his longtime political associate Scott Shires, a notable GOP operative.

Shires pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in the case. His sentencing is slated for June 23. He faces up to a year in prison and a $25,000 fine.

If Schaffer and the members of Congress who put up the $3.6 million earmark are indeed Orr's victims, it's hard to imagine how they could be such easy marks.

Years before Orr set his sights on them, he was allegedly fleecing guys like Larry Potthoff, a Franktown general contractor, who told me he lost about $13,000 to Orr beginning in the mid-1990s.

"He kept sending letters, saying he's talking to Saudi Arabia . . . and on and on and on. But you could never get him on the phone. . . . He used Scott Shires as his go-between guy," Potthoff said. "I called several times and told him I wanted my money back. No response."

The criminal case going to the jury concerns allegedly fraudulent representations made to the federal government by Orr's National Alternative Fuels Foundation (NAFF), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. According to the criminal indictment, NAFF received over $2 million in grant money to research a new fuel additive. Specifically, the indictment alleges that NAFF submitted false documents--including bogus scientific testing--to the EPA in support of the grant request from 2001 to 2004. Orr is also alleged to have solicited almost $600,000 from private investors to "research" this fuel additive, most of which was deposited into his personal bank account.

We're shocked 9NEWS only notes that Orr "worked with politicians on Capitol Hill," since there is much more to the story: the Director of the National Alternative Fuels Foundation during 2004 and 2005 was former Rep. Bob Schaffer.

Schaffer served as Director of the NAFF from October 2004 until March 2005, just two months before the nonprofit was administratively dissolved. By May of the following year, Orr had been indicted. This is critical because according to documents we've seen, Orr continued to make these allegedly false reports to the EPA through at least December of 2004--well into Schaffer's tenure as Director.

Schaffer was not himself indicted in this case, though his name did appear on the witness list. We are told that the case against Orr is pretty strong: a jury is entering deliberations as we write this to decide the truth of the matter. If Orr is found guilty, watch for the next logical question--what Bob Schaffer knew about this alleged fraud and when he knew it--to become quite urgent.

Doctors for the Massachusetts Democrat say tests conducted after Kennedy suffered a seizure this weekend show a tumor in his left parietal lobe. Preliminary results from a biopsy of the brain identified the cause of the seizure as a malignant glioma.

Republican Mike Huckabee responded to an offstage noise during his speech to the National Rifle Association by suggesting it was Barack Obama diving to the floor because someone had aimed a gun at him.

Hearing a loud noise and interrupting his speech, Huckabee said: "That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He's getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him and he -- he dove for the floor."

There were only a few murmurs in the crowd after the remark.

"There can be no doubt that extending the designation of marriage to same-sex couples, rather than denying it to all couples, is the equal protection remedy that is most consistent with our state's general legislative policy and preference," the ruling said.

"Accordingly, in light of the conclusions we reach concerning the constitutional questions brought to us for resolution, we determine that the language of Section 300 [California's Defense of Marriage Act] limiting the designation of marriage to a 'union between a man and a woman' is unconstitutional, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available to both opposite-sex and same-sex couples."

JERUSALEM (CNN) - In a particularly sharp blast from halfway around the world, President Bush suggested Thursday that Sen. Barack Obama and other Democrats are in favor of "appeasement" of terrorists in the same way U.S. leaders appeased Nazis in the run-up to World War II.

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," said Bush, in what White House aides privately acknowledged was a reference to calls by Obama and other Democrats for the U.S. president to sit down for talks with leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said in remarks to the Israeli Knesset. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American Senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

The remarks seemed to be a not-so-subtle attempt to continue to raise doubts about Obama with Jewish-Americans. Those doubts were already stoked by Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, when he recently charged that Obama is the favored candidate of the terror group Hamas.

Obama last week called the Hamas allegation a "smear" and the Democratic presidential frontrunner also quickly lashed out Thursday at Bush's speech in Israel in a prepared statement released to CNN by his campaign.

"It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 6Oth anniversary of Israel's independence to launch a false political attack," said Obama. "It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel.