Lincoln Mitchell: Rethinking the American Electorate after an Obama Victory After properly invoking a great American philosopher, Lawrence Berra by noting “it ain’t over ’til it’s over,” HuffPost’s Lincoln Mitchell points out that an Obama victory will force all of us, right and left, to rethink our positions. I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now, ever since running across this thoughtful rumination comparing political divides to religious ones. There will be no place for polarized politics in the future; it’s a failed model that merely perpetuates itself with constant discord and conflict. We don’t have time for…
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This morning we ran some errands, went back to the house to retrieve my forgotten ID, and then we went to the village hall to vote. When we got there, we were waved over to a small table and given early-voting applications to fill in and sign – fortunately, I had thought to retrieve my actual voter’s registration card, which had stuff on it we needed, like our precinct number. Otherwise, they would have looked it up. We were advised about the constitutional convention kerfuffle, and were given a sheet explaining what the ballot initiative was, how by law it’s…
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Editor & Publisher is keeping track of newspaper endorsements of Obama and McCain; they’re also noting which papers were for Kerry and which were for Bush last time around. TUESDAY: Updated Endorsement Tally — Obama Leads 121-42
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There’s a third “major paper” in the Chicago area, the Daily Herald. They’re not quite as famous as the Chicago Tribune or the Sun-Times, being known more as a suburban paper with a raft of very small community papers (some of the “shopper paper and local high school sports” variety). It’s more conservative than the Trib and makes no bones about it; having dealt with them trying to get publicity inserted for my Episcopal parish, I can tell you they’re really into faith news. They probably are more interested in items of interest to Catholics and maybe conservative Protestants, though.…
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What’s New in ScribeFire 3.1.3? – ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging The following changes were made to ScribeFire between versions 3.1.2 and 3.1.3: Bug Fixes Fixed bug causing some users to see “Could not set up API Object for Blog type” error Yeah, this post using Scribefire is probably still going to get the angle brackets stripped by WordPress: this started happening with the latest version of WP and no fix in sight yet. It’s a PHP bug, and not easily fixable according to David. UPDATE: Yep, it failed. I don’t know if WP 2.7 will fix this or not.
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I have a TERRIBLE memory, but sometimes I get a flash of insight. Does the name Nathan Sproul mean anything to you? I got one of those flashes, and found this Daily Kos: State of the Nation post that I actually remembered reading in 2004.
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Someone me sent the following via email several days ago, thinking it was probably something I’d want to see. I think they thought it was funny, the idea that Illinois wants to get rid of Barack Obama. We went back and forth in email about it, and my correspondent thinks I jumped to the wrong conclusion about what’s going on in this little message. I’ve taken a couple of days to think it over, and I now agree that it’s not the “whisper campaign” kind of message, with a hidden message of racism, that I originally thought. It’s just a…
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Here’s a quick update on the Floor Project From Hell: We’re almost done! Except we’ve had scope creep! We started laying out the floor after it acclimated on Friday. It’s now Monday; yes, we’re slow, but we hit a minor snag and we’re now setting up for a big finish. Which involves totally repainting the room in a slightly darker color. I’d gone through hell patching about a zillion screw-anchor holes in that room 5 years ago – but there were a couple of dings and places I hadn’t done a very good job. First of all, we knew we…
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The hysterico-pundit wing of the GOP has been accusing ACORN (via its contractors) of fraudulently registering football teams and cartoon characters to vote. They see it as a vast left-wing conspiracy, but really it’s low-income contractors trying to defraud ACORN, because they get paid by the number of registrations they turn in. As has been pointed out repeatedly, Mickey Mouse isn’t going to show up to vote. It might throw off the statistics for total number of registered Democrats there are in each locality, but there’s little likelihood of any serious electoral fraud being committed. Now, here’s a twist: a…
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For the first time in its 161-year history, the Chicago Tribune endorses a Democrat for President, Barack Obama. As it happens, I prefer reading the Trib to the agressively blue-collar Sun-Times; never liked the latter papers rah-rah attitude toward Daley and other local pols. Also, their comics section sucks. Via Daily Kos: State of the Nation