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I predict Barack Obama will win the Presidency with an Electoral victory of 277 to 261. Ohio, I think, will stay red, but Colorado, Virginia, and Iowa will turn blue (if not Virginia, then I think Indiana may turn around). There is the possibility of a larger Obama victory, but it's stayed tight so far.

Since you won't have my posts to read anymore, you should get your news from these two guys:

Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic
Ben Smith at Politico

They're the best.

Article of the Year

(even though it's from 2007)

From "Goodbye to All That" by Andrew Sullivan:

The logic behind the candidacy of Barack Obama is not, in the end, about Barack Obama. It has little to do with his policy proposals, which are very close to his Democratic rivals’ and which, with a few exceptions, exist firmly within the conventions of our politics. It has little to do with Obama’s considerable skills as a conciliator, legislator, or even thinker. It has even less to do with his ideological pedigree or legal background or rhetorical skills. Yes, as the many profiles prove, he has considerable intelligence and not a little guile. But so do others, not least his formidably polished and practiced opponent Senator Hillary Clinton.

[snip]

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

Video of the Year

Thanks, Dustin!

Dustin gave me the link to the article "He ventured forth to bring light to the world." It's quite funny:

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”
Continue Reading "He ventured forth to bring light to the world"

History Lesson

I Love The Onion

From their article "Hubble Kaleidoscope Finds Evidence Of Space Looking All Crazy":

BALTIMORE—Astronomers analyzing the first images captured by the new Hubble Space Kaleidoscope, which went online Tuesday, announced that they've acquired the first concrete evidence that the universe is in a constant state of total weirdness.

"With their unprecedented resolution, the latest images from the new kaleidoscope reveal that space, once thought to be isotropic, is actually continuously expanding, unfolding, and rearranging in a series of freaky patterns," said astronomer Douglas Stetler, head of the Space Kaleidoscope Science Institute in Baltimore. "It's an exciting time for the field of astrokaleidoscopics, or anyone interested in the vast, wacked-out nature of space."

Satirizing the Satire

You've probably seen this New Yorker cover by now. I thought it was funny, but as an editor I don't think I would have run it. Too many people are too stupid.

This parody from the of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer put an edge to my thoughts on the matter.

I think there would have been a little more outrage about the second one.