That's professionalism

Reporter of the year

Make sure to watch until the end.

I can't wait for the new Harry Potter

My final statement before election

Ben Folds Five Reunion

Ben Folds Five - MySpace Front To Back concert

This is the way to decide the election

Unbelievable McCain Vs. Obama Dance-Off - Watch more free videos

The best baseball non-fight ever

Call off the dogs!

Frank Rich of the NY Times talks Sunday about McCain and Palin's dangerous rhetoric.

Very entertaining SNL Thursday

A dreadful marriage

Gen. Petraeus agrees with Obama on talking with enemies

McCain is inciting these people

Props to the camera man for going to the McCain events and getting this footage.

"Once it's locked, it's safe"

Water won't help that, son

Some conservatives like their candidates served dumb

ONLY ELITISTS CARE ABOUT PRONUNCIATION.... Barack Obama pronounces "Pakistan" correctly, with a soft "a," just like a lot of people who know what they're talking about, including Gen. David Petraeus. Apparently, having completely run out of compelling policy arguments to make, some high-profile conservatives have decided to make this their latest campaign hobbyhorse.
The National Review's Mark Stein, for example, said that Obama prefers the "exotic pronunciation." He added, "[O]ne thing I like about Sarah Palin is the way she says 'Eye-raq'."
This came after the National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez posted an email that argued, "[N]o one in flyover country says Pock-i-stahn. It's annoying."
The inanity of what the right decides to whine about never ceases to amaze me. That Obama's pronunciation is accurate is irrelevant. Mispronunciation apparently makes some conservatives feel better about themselves, and raises doubts about candidates who care to get this right. "Elites" care about country names; real Americans don't.
My friend Adam Serwer's take was spot-on:
To pronounce something correctly is to be "ostentatiously exotic," while pronouncing something incorrectly is raised to the level of something like a presidential qualification. Meanwhile, there are thousands of Americans of Pakistani descent who are themselves "ostentatiously exotic" by virtue of their names (and it would be elitist of them to expect anyone to pronounce them correctly) and ancestry.
Keep in mind that these are the same people who insist that a culture of ignorance that hold black people back while lauding Sarah Palin's vast ignorance of public policy as some kind of tremendous virtue. They demand merit from others and only mediocrity from themselves, because said mediocrity is touted as proof of authenticity.
The right's anti-intellectualism seems to be getting worse, doesn't it?

A sad sight

From The Daily Dish:

"Sit down, take a deep breath and get a better idea of why the people introducing Palin and McCain keep referring to Barack Hussein Obama."

Does she really expect someone to believe this?

Amie Parnes reports from a McCain speech in Pennsylvania that Cindy McCain again went after Obama directly today, and accuses him, more or less, of endangering her son's life. “The day that Sen. Obama cast a vote to not to fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body let me tell you,” she said. “I would suggest Sen. Obama change shoes with me for just one day. I suggest he take a day and go watch our men and women deploying.”

My fellow who?

What is patriotism?

Thomas L. Friedman's latest NY Times column looks at Sarah Palin's version of the word.

Also take a look at Maureen Dowd's latest.

Roger Ebert chimes in on presidential politics

I do not like you, John McCain. My feeling has nothing to do with issues. It has to do with common courtesy. During the debate, you refused to look Barack Obama in the eye. Indeed, you refused to look at him at all. Even when the two of you shook hands at the start, you used your eyes only to locate his hand, and then gazed past him as you shook it.

Annual Telemarketer Awards rudely interrupted

The keynote speaker at this year’s prestigious Telemarketer Awards ceremony was disrupted by an ill-timed phone call from a Citibank operator offering a very competitive rate on a Visa card. The audience grew impatient with the caller’s persistence and became further annoyed moments later when a Satellite TV company called to say they had installers working in the neighborhood and were offering three months of free subscription service. Organizers of the Telemarketer Awards say next year they hope to avoid these types of rude interruptions by including their phone number in the government’s Do Not Call list.

Keating 5 video

CNN fact-checked this video and it's verdict was that the content is true.

Press blocked from McCain supporters

Constantly under the watchful eyes of security, the media wasn't permitted to wander around inside Coachman Park to talk to Sarah Palin supporters. When reporters tried to leave the designated press area and head toward the bleachers where the crowd was seated, an escort would dart out of nowhere and confront him or her and say, "Can I help you?'' and turn the person around.When one reporter asked an escort, who would not give her name, why the press wasn't allowed to mingle, she said that in the past, negative things had been written. The campaign wanted to avoid that possibility Monday.

SNL VP Debate

Battle of personal property

Enjoy a game of Pac Man

Since it's the weekend, here is a link to a free game of Pac Man. use just need to use the arrow keys to play. The site also has classics such as Galaga, Super Mario Brothers and Sonic The Hedgehog.

Who is to blame for the economy?

I would say greed.

Here's what FactCheck.org says:

"So who is to blame?"

• The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
• Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
• Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
• Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
• The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
• Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
• Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
• Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
• The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
• An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
• Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

"The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult."

Palin's eyelash snafu

My wife pointed this out to me last night.

A nod from "You talkin' to me."

The steadier hand

Much has been written about McCain's mercurial temperament during the past few weeks. An election campaign that was supposed to be all about Barack Obama has turned out to be all about John McCain. In the process, the other side of the equation — Obama's steadiness throughout — has been pretty much overlooked. Just after the House shot down the bailout, Obama took to the stage in Colorado, and the contrast with McCain couldn't have been greater: "Now is not the time for fear, now is not the time for panic," he said. "We may not be able to do everything overnight ... But I want you to understand, I know we can do it ... Things are never smooth in Congress. It will get done."

Read full article from Time.com here.

Union man takes on racism

A pretty amazing speech by the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka. To see a white union man take on racism this way is very moving. Something truly profound could happen in this election, if we want it to.

Bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley voting for Obama

Now this is a good ad. A Virginia Democrat sends over a new radio spot that Obama is airing in the southern part of the state -- it stars homegrown bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley vouching for Obama's values and character to the tune of some banjo pickin' in the background.

It was Senator Barack Obama who crossed the aisle

Reported from the NY Times:

On Wednesday evening, as the senators gathered to vote on the $700 billion financial rescue package, Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, walked over to the Republican side of the chamber to extend a greeting to Senator John McCain of Arizona. While it took Mr. Obama several seconds to make his way over to Mr. McCain, the actual handshake lasted barely a second, as Mr. McCain responded with a chilly look, a turn of his head and a brief return handshake.

A little heavy handed, but I like the sentiment

Register to vote!

Illegal voter purging rampant

With Election Day rapidly approaching, a new report, obtained exclusively by CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian, raises serious questions and exposes flaws in the way states maintain their voter registration rolls. States and counties regularly update their voter registration rolls for accuracy, removing people who have moved, died, or committed a felony. It is known as "voter purging." But, the new report by the non-partisan public policy and law institute, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law provides troubling new insight into the process. There are no national standards and as a result, the cleaning up of voter rolls is not as precise as it should be and eligible voters are often wrongly removed.

Check out the report here.

Homer Simpson tries to vote for Obama

Really.....I mean really?

This is almost a parody.

From the Hartford Courant:

[State Rep. Livvy] Floren, who represents some of the richest neighborhoods in America, said she is more concerned about the younger bankers with large mortgages and little children. She bumped into three people during the past week who are now unemployed — two from Lehman and one from the investment firm Bear Stearns. With no bonuses that they once relied on, the mid-level Wall Street workers will likely pull back from buying the fanciest cars and the largest boats.

McCain's contradictions

McCain has stated many times recently that he is the candidate that will cross partisan lines to improve America, but yet he continues to go against that logic in his many campaign visits. Here are two stories that echo that sentiment.

Story 1

Story 2

The U.S. is embarrassing itself

Remember, she was a journalism major.