Lucky Sean is at the game. Don't riot too hard Sean!Did everyone see Obama's 30 primetime special before the game? I thought it was pretty good.

I thought the three innings of baseball that brought home the first professional sports championship of my lifetime was pretty good also (sorry Soul, the AFL doesn't count).

When's the parade?

She reported on various attempts at voter suppression, and showed that flyer we found on campus. It looks like they took the picture right off our website!

Rachel, come to Drexel after the election!

I don't write about the PUMAs too much because it's a bit too easy to make fun of them, but this was too funny for me to resist. Somebody left an anonymous comment at one of the big PUMA blogs that asserted, completely devoid of corraborating evidence, that she was a disenchanted Obama employee who had been part of the giant Obama conspiracy to flood the internet with astroturfed sycophants. It was, in short, a hilariously transparent lie.

In the extended entry I've copied the comment, but first a couple notes. The anonymous faux-whistleblower started off small; she was hired to write positive stuff about Obama online and demoralize the PUMAs. Stupid and untrue, but nothing that hasn't been alledged by the PUMAs for a while. She gets a little ahead of herself, though, when she startes laying out the secret Obama plan to conspire with the "MSM" to inflate Obama's poll numbers, thus drawing in the sheeple.

If the PUMAs weren't so hilariously follish, however, they might smell a few problems with this story. First, assuming such a vast and diabolical conspiracy existed, surely it wouldn't be known outside of a cadre of top advisors and corporate folk. But by her own admission, this anonymous commentor was ambivalent about Clinton and Obama, and was just hired by the campaign "for a job," hardly a description of someone with access to strategy. She slipped so smoothly from "we were posting on blogs" to "we had a strategy to manipulate the entire traditional media." If this person was an employee of the campaign in any position to know upper level strategy (real or imagined) I'll eat my foot.

I remember going to the polls for the first time back in April and being utterly confused by the verbosity of the ballot initiatives. It took me a few minutes to read them, re-read them, and make a decision on one and decide not to vote on the other because I still didn't know what it meant.

This time around, I'm checking them out before I go. The Committee of Seventy has a great page about what questions will be on the ballot Nov. 4, and even explains them in plain English!

Check out this Philly.com editorial on the first ballot initiative about funding our water infrastructure -- which is phrased sooo negatively, seriously..."Do you favor the incurring of indebtedness by the Commonwealth of $400,000,000"...as if anyone is going to vote for something starting out like that during this economic crisis? It sounds like a lot, but that $400 million will go toward creating jobs and bettering our infrastructure, which is really what we need in an economic downturn -- not corporate welfare bailout after bailout.

Remember these guys from the Wassupp Budweiser commercials? Well they are back after 8 years of George Bush politics and things are not good. Make sure to listen to who is talking on the TV in the beginning of the clip (McSame).

8 More days till Change!!

There's a lot of schadenfreude going around regarding the Ashley Todd fiasco, and as much fun as it is, I think that Duncan's notes about the role of the media are worth digesting. And I agree, she really should have gone with the "O."

My sanctimony notwithstanding, there is a hilarious twitter feed that the College Republican field organizers were using that is now all Todd all the time. It's hashed as #litf08 (life in the field 08), and contains some pretty hilarious zingers from gloating Obamaphiles. To wit;

I wasn't going to say anything, but a McCain supporter savagely beat me with a walker & carved a backwards M into my face.

Hmm, it was an okay Obama frame-job, just a few inconsistencies snagged you. Overall I'd give you a "B".

Man, you little Atwaters should have stuck to the affirmative action bake sales.

I've long maintained that the NRO Corner is one of the most concentrated bastions of stupidity on the internet. The PUMAs tried to give them a run for their money, but the Corner maintains it's edge by sheer volume and diversity of stupid voices. In a qiuck, unattributed, item on Monday the Corner makes the case that Palin is totally smarter than Joe Biden, it's just that he projects confidence by bluffing, and she's too honest to pretend to know the answer to something she doesn't.

That's run of the mill stupid, though. The thing that makes it worthy of ridicule is the absurd recitation of her merits;

Sarah Palin has won several tough elections, mastered energy policy, and persuaded more than 80 percent of Alaskans that she's doing a fine and competent job as chief executive of their state.

Palin hasn't shown any evidence of mastering anything, let alone energy policy. In fact, she has routinely shown that she is misinformed and ignorant about the state and future of our energy needs. Her experience consists of being on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission for a year, and being governor of a state that has lots of fossil fuel stores.

This tickled me. Also, I will never understand the kind of person who bangs out angry and incoherent threats on YouTube comment threads. I can't imagine many bigger wastes of time.

and that's why you need to also. I admit I have a fascination with these YouTube videos of crazy rightwingers at McCain/Palin rallies. The idea that there are people out there who are interested in politics enough to stand in line for hours to see a politician and yet apparently devote no time or energy to investigating issues blows me away.

That these people so transparently recieve all the instruction they need from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News was perhaps demonstrated most clearly with the conspiratorial connection between ACORN, Obama, and the economic unravelings. A not insignificant number of people listened to Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh saying "30 years ago black people started getting mortgages, and that's why the credit crunch happened!" and thought to themselves "Hey, that makes sense!"

I'm fascinated by their ignorance, and repulsed by their hatred. Here are a few of the videos making the rounds. Don't forget, if you stay home on November 4th, these people will pick your president for you.

For anyone who has grandparents in Florida, let alone if you have Jewish grandparents in Florida, you are going to love this video. It is a truly tremendous idea, and who knows I think it could really work. What do you think?

Courtesy of www.dailykos.com