It's hard to let go...

We're all gonna die!

High-fructose corn syrup will kill you.

The ozone hole is reacting to more chemicals.

President McCain.

AIDS and where it actually came from.

Never say these things to a teacher unless you want to be cut up for the next craft project.

Angry rich white men

Who think they should be entitled to run the country.

Mitt Romney:

It Gets Worse for Mitt Romney as He is Named the Least Influential Person of 2012

Romney’s lasting legacy isn’t that he was at the helm when the Republican Party finally crashed and burned on a national scale. This honestly wasn’t Romney’s fault. It doesn’t matter who the Republicans might have nominated, they would have lost in 2012. (Having a party platform that alienates women, African-Americans, Latinos, and young voters tends to have that sort of impact on the electoral bottom line.) Mitt Romney’s lasting legacy is that he confirmed to the rest of America what it had long suspected. Those old, rich, conservative white guys who are looking to buy elections view the rest of the country with contempt. When these men say they want their country back, they really mean that they think they are entitled to run the show. Women belong in the kitchen. Young people should stop being lazy and get a job. African Americans are invisible, and Latinos are criminals who should be prosecuted and/or (self) deported. Naming Mitt Romney the least influential person of 2012 isn’t kicking a man when he is down. It is telling the truth about a presidential nominee who had done so little, yet felt entitled to so much.

Top Romney Adviser Brags About Losing Poor, Minority Voters To Obama

John McCain and his attack on Susan Rice:

John McCain sounded awfully chastened yesterday. Gone was the bluster of doing “everything in my power to block” Susan Rice from a position she has yet to be nominated for. He didn’t question her competence. The rage gave way to this Sunday morning walkback: “I think she deserves the ability and the opportunity to explain herself and her position, just as she said. But, she’s not the problem. The problem is the president of the United States.” 

I doubt McCain is done being an angry, bitter man who still hasn’t forgiven Rice for her attack on him during the 2008 presidential campaign. But someone must have told him that trashing an accomplished, relatively young woman of color who wasn’t even remotely responsible for what happened in Benghazi is just not a good look these days. Maybe McCain underestimated how many people had Rice’s back, from the Congressional Black Caucus to the president himself — just as his fellow party members had underestimated the power of the voting bloc they commanded on Nov. 6.

And another variation:

4. Because McCain is being a jackass—and Obama is sick of it. Arguably more than any other national figure, the senior senator from Arizona is driven in every aspect of his public behavior by personal pique. In the wake of the 2000 Republican nomination fight, when he believed Bush and his campaign had defeated him by nefarious means, McCain lunged to the center and became one of the sharpest thorns in the side of the new president from his own party. In the wake of the 2008 election, when he was soundly thumped by a Democratic challenger whom he regarded as a neophyte and a pretender whose experience and valor were no match for his own, McCain immediately shed all traces of mavericky independence and became one of Obama’s fiercest critics from the right. Now into McCain’s crosshairs has come Rice, who routinely stripped the bark off him four years ago as one of Obama’s most quotable surrogates. (“His tendency is to shoot first and ask questions later; it is dangerous, and we can’t afford four more years of this reckless foreign policy” is just one vintage example of the form.) No one who knows McCain believes he has forgotten these brickbats or that they are not a substantial part of what is motivating him now. Nor does anyone close to Obama not suspect that, after four years of McCain’s truculence, he’s had quite enough of it, thanks, and is indeed sorta spoiling for a fight.

From sex to bombs...

Interesting take on the latest sex scandal.

Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy.

McCain is still sore he isn't president.

Run away, run away!!

The perils of being a woman online.

Did Anonymous save the election by blocking Rove's hacking minions?

Verdun, France has a Forbidden Forest filled with 12 million unexploded bombs from WWI.

So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye!

As we leave 2010 in the rear view mirror....

Amazing photos.

Wild weather.

Wingnuts rant about DADT.

Hissy fits and mean girls.

Finally losing the Civil War.

The funniest signs from December.

Pattycake cats:

McCain declares victory in Iraq

Apparently we won that war.

What exactly we won is undefined.

Just remember, while we complain bitterly about what President Obama has or hasn't done, President McCain would have been hundreds of times worse....

Separated at birth?

Red shirt, blue shirt

Throw dirt, get hurt.

An experiment by an eighth grade student in a pro-Obama school shows intolerance and hate:

"They said, 'You can't make up your mind. You can't wear a McCain shirt one day and an Obama shirt the next day.' "

But she sure did, and she turned her journal into a report for her history teacher, earning Catherine extra credit. We asked the teacher, Norma Cassin-Pountney, whether it was ironic that Catherine would be subject to such intolerance from pro-Obama supporters in a community that prides itself on its liberal outlook.

"That's what we discussed," Cassin-Pountney said about the debate in the classroom when the experiment was revealed. "I said, here you are, promoting this person [Obama] that believes we are all equal and included, and look what you've done? The students were kind of like, 'Oh, yeah.' I think they got it."

I have to admit I am guilty of such prejudice and anger. My only excuse is... they started it first!

The best sentence ever explaining why McCain lost.

August J. Pollak: (my bold)

There is going to be a lot of talk about why McCain lost, and I think that's really stupid, because just like the media spending ten hours going over a five-minute revelation, they are likewise going to spend weeks debating an answer that anyone with half a brain cell could tell you- because he pissed away everything he pretended he stood for to have a mentally imbalanced and intellectually defunct pseudo-Christian fundamentalist with a passion for petty grudges and murdering large mammals as his running mate as part of an escalating campaign of fear and racism.

I guarantee you, there will be a painfully large amount of opinions now that this is over using the phrase "I feel sorry for McCain." I don't. He deserves this and he knows it. The last few months of his campaign were evil, and tonight, by an overwhelming margin, we defeated it. We bashed evil in its skull and left it for dead.

You backed the wrong man, Holy Joe...

So you get to deal with the consequences:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is scheduled to meet with Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) on Thursday to discuss his future in the Senate Democratic Conference, according to a Democratic Senate source.

A growing number of Senate Democrats have been pressuring Reid to penalize Lieberman for aggressively backing Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) in this year’s presidential contest. At stake for Lieberman is his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and his place in the Democratic Conference.

It remains unclear what Reid will say in his upcoming meeting with Lieberman, but Democrats believe he is inching toward at least wresting the Homeland Security gavel from him. Lieberman, who sides with Democrats on most issues except the war in Iraq, became one of McCain’s most ardent allies and one of President-elect Obama’s vocal critics this presidential season.

Forewarned

Is forearmed.

Rotwang of TPM cafe:

Not to count any unhatched chickens, but I'd like to gently remind all you Obamaniacs that the Democratic candidate is running on tax cuts, enlarging the military, expanding the invasion of Afghanistan, and sustaining the grip of private insurance companies on the nation's health care system. Our likely Secretary of the Treasury and economic policy czar is Larry Summers, who to the best of my knowledge has never worn love beads. Bush's Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, may stay on for a bit. Obama is running as the competent Republican. No doubt, a competent Republican is better than an incompetent Republican, especially if he or she happens to be a Democrat.

We know this already. Obama is a centrist (so the feeble McCain/Palin charge that he's the most extreme liberal in the Senate is a crock). I'm sure that President Obama will disappoint liberals the country over when he takes the reins and starts cleaning up the mess. But I'm ready to be disappointed, not horrified as I'm sure I would be in a McCain administration.

Update:
Think Progress goes after the center right myth::

As David Sirota has noted, the idea that Americans are fundamentally conservative is a myth. Indeed, a majority of Americans want progressive solutions to the nation’s problems, supporting universal health care, expanded environmental protections, a higher minimum wage, the availability of safe and legal abortions, federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, and the rights of same-sex couples to be legally recognized. Additionally, a majority opposes the Iraq War.

By insisting that — despite all appearances to the contrary — Americans favor conservatives, the right wing is trying to handicap the progressive agenda before it has a chance of being enacted. But today’s election results are likely to throw an even greater wrench in the “center-right country” myth. The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne disputed the conservatives’ entire premise, on MSNBC:

I disagree the notion that we are still a center-right country. We may have been a center-right country. But I think what you’re seeing here, John McCain is running very clearly against Barack Obama as a redistributionist and a socialist. And if the country votes for Barack Obama, I think the country will be saying not that they move far to the left, but we’re not center-right anymore. They want some government action to solve some of these problems.

A McCain/Palin acolyte

And a fan of Karl Rove:



Via El Gato Negro of Online Blogintegrity

Being schooled by an 82 year old grandmother

Taking the 'undecideds' to task:

If you are undecided - and I am at a complete loss for how you could be - please consider the following:

Which party has been screaming terrorist, socialist, Marxist, murder him and kill him… and which party has been talking about hope and unity.

Which party has been throwing everything but the kitchen sink at you everyday for the past two weeks hoping to scare you into thinking that there is an Un-American part of the country… and which party has been sayng that there is no red America and no blue America but only the United States of America.

Which party thinks war is the answer to everything… and which party has suggested that maybe we need to sit down and talk this out to see if peace is possible.

Which Presidential candidate just gave a speech accusing Barack Obama of delaying the World Series game. I mean of all things. In fact, that is a lie. But my god, that is the McCain talking point for the day? That’s a small thing I know, but when Harold hears something on TV about sports, that’s a big thing in our house. So he checked. It was a lie. But McCain is counting on you to not check to see if he was telling the truth. He is counting on Americans to be fat and lazy. And as silly and ridiculous as that little lie is… what more do you need? He will lie to you to get your vote.

So tell me again why you are undecided?

Oh yes I forgot. The terrorists are going to get us.

Link found via Morse at MediaNeedle

Election blog sprinkles

Distributorcap of DistributorcapNY has an amazing list of odd information about our elections and presidents.

Chuck Todd of MSNBC lists the info on each state of the Union and what to expect.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight:

I continue to find a hair's worth of tightening on balance in the state-by-state polls -- even as Obama's position in the national trackers seems to be roughly as strong as it has ever been. This, ironically, is the exact reverse of the position we saw earlier in the week, when the national polls seemed to be tightening even as the state polls weren't.

However, Obama's win percentage has ticked upward again for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he's gotten some relatively good numbers out of Pennsylvania since our last update, with PPP and Zogby giving him leads of 8 and 14 points, respectively, and Rasmussen showing his lead expanding to 6 points after having been at 4 before. (The Zogby poll is probably an outlier, but may serve to balance out outliers like Strategic Vision on the other side).

Secondly, McCain's clock has simply run out. While there is arguable evidence of a small tightening, there is no evidence of a dramatic tightening of the sort he would need to make Tuesday night interesting.

Athenae of First Draft muses on how good it feels.

Jed Lewison of the Jed Report about the coal bankruptcy quote:

All you need to know to understand the video is that the Drudge, FOX, and the McCain campaign joined forces with Newsbusters to push a story that the San Francisco Chronicle had concealed an eleven month old recording that supposedly contained devastating audio of Barack Obama proposing to bankrupt the entire coal industry.

Not only was that story false (more detail below), but it turns out that Barack Obama and John McCain have the same position on clean coal technology, and Ohio's Republican senator said McCain's plan to fight global warming would "put coal out of business."

Paul Krugman muses what will happen to the Republican party after an Obama victory:

I’m not saying that the G.O.P. is about to become irrelevant. Republicans will still be in a position to block some Democratic initiatives, especially if the Democrats fail to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

And that blocking ability will ensure that the G.O.P. continues to receive plenty of corporate dollars: this year the U.S. Chamber of Congress has poured money into the campaigns of Senate Republicans like Minnesota’s Norm Coleman, precisely in the hope of denying Democrats a majority large enough to pass pro-labor legislation.

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.

Glenn Greenwald of Salon on why Bush cannot help the Republicans campaign:

George Bush is the person in whom the Right placed its blind faith, the one they glorified and held up as the ultimate standard-bearer of what they believe in. And now he -- and they -- lay in shambles and disgrace. No matter what metric one uses, it's difficult to overstate what a profound failure the Bush presidency is, and everyone -- including Bush -- knows that. The most important aspect of this Tuesday's election is to finalize their humiliating repudiation and to bury them for what they've done.

Who wouldn't want an endorsement from the Prince of Darkness?

Update 11/3: He really earned it!

I know it's past Halloween

But I thought I'd scare you a bit more:



How the rightwingers see her:

Why do we do this to our politicians?

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

Couldn't we change our Constitution and/or the rules and have a 'no confidence' vote instead of impeachment, and have somehow a faster campaign time? Our news media won't know what to do with themselves the day after the election.

McCain's indifference to women is obvious

America says enough!

Dozens Of Call Center Workers Walk Off Job In Protest Rather Than Read McCain Script Attacking Obama

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being "dangerously weak on crime," "coddling criminals," and for voting against "protecting children from danger."

Williams' daughter told her that up to 40 of her co-workers had refused to read the script, and had left the call center after supervisors told them that they would have to either read the call or leave, Williams says. The call center is called Americall, and it's located in Hobart, IN.

Up is down, far is near

The presidential race is tight. Tight. Squeaky tight. So tight that cheating at the electronic voting machines will tip the campaign to McCain. So tight that scaring off Democratic voters in swing states will tip the campaign to McCain. So tight that dropping voters off poll sheets, placing police at the voting booths, swamping the airwaves and flyers with misinformation will tip the campaign to McCain.

All McCain has to do is hang tight.

GOP nominee John McCain said Sunday that the presidential race will be close by Election Day despite a bevy of polls showing him significantly behind Democrat Barack Obama.

“We’re doing fine,” Sen. McCain (Ariz.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press”. “We have closed in the last week... You’ll be up very, very late on election night.”