Might as well pull my head out of the sand for a moment. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be wallowing in schadenfreude and trepidation no matter who wins next week, but I’ve been curious to see which way (if any) Jane Galt would go. I won’t spoil the surprise.

Alright, I just sent our brand spanking new 32 page BTTB to the printer. It looks pretty nice from what I can tell (the glaring mistakes don’t appear until it’s been printed). I’ll be getting the issue up online tomorrow, so check it out.

It seems that the Guardian’s absurd, hubristic campaign to influence voters in Clark County, OH using only the plaintive cries of their readership is drawing to a close. Here are some responses. A cynic might suppose that the whole point of the exercise was to elicit abusive comments from semi-literate idiots, and there are certainly plenty of those. So the following is especially refreshing:

I understand the Guardian is sponsoring a service where British citizens write to Americans to advise them on how to vote. Thank heavens! I was adrift in a sea of confusion and you are my beacon of hope!

Feel free to respond to this email with your advice. Please keep in mind that I am something of an anglophile, so this is not confrontational. Please remember, too, that I am merely an American. That means I am not very bright. It means I have no culture or sense of history. It also means that I am barely literate, so please don’t use big, fancy words.

Nicely done there. And yes, I’d find it just as offensive if the Telegraph ran a pro-Bush letter-writing campaign. The thing is, they haven’t.

Alternate headlines for this story gratefully accepted. My submission:

Control of actions central in walking down flight of stairs

Control of actions central in going to the shops

Control of actions central in tying of shoelaces

And so on.

The ODE deserves a tip o’ the hat for making such a big deal out of this one, if only because the collective comedy self-mortification has been so much fun to read. However, I think their post-debacle analysis doesn’t quite hit the spot. (Link to today’s editorial coming as soon as it’s online.)

After a hard day of “facilitat[ing] open communication and foster[ing] goal setting”, I too am usually disposed to kick back with some suds. I (and for once I feel confident speaking on behalf of the entire OC) find it difficult to moralize too much about the revelation that participants of this ASUO “finance retreat” drank – shock! – beer and smoked – gasp! – pot. And the ODE doesn’t do that either, exactly. What they do say is that this is inappropriate behavior for participants in a retreat funded by $3200 of student incidental fees. And they’re right, because ASUO groups should never get to spend $3200 of incidental fees on resort accomodation. Never. I don’t care whether they behave, collectively, like Mormons or the second coming of John Belushi. I don’t care how much open communication was facilitated. It matters not to me how much goal setting was fostered. Even if they fostered the setting of (say) eight goals during this process, that still works out to $400 a goal. Folks, this is an unacceptable price for goal-setting-fostering. That money was – figuratively if not literally – pissed up the wall. And the only reason it’s even reported as something outside the norm is that some college students (from Eugene, no less) got high.

Just wanted to underline that point. Moreover, if you really want to facilitate open communication, a couple of cases of beer will do a hell of a lot more than a trip to Sunriver.

Okay, so I am. And I’ll bet Blog did this! My evidence? He’s for terrorists! He mocks esteemed member of government! He takes advertising from hard-left front groups! And he’s the Peter-Parker of Anti-Bush propaganda yard signs! You did it Blog, we all know you did it. Your mother and I are very disappointed in you. Go to your room. Nevermind, go to this room instead. Damn I must be desperate for content if this is the best I can do.

Here is Ryan Nyburg on Michael Moore. Nyburg is equivocal, but one bit demands a response. Actually, it doesn’t. But I’m going to respond anyway:

For all of this, [Moore] does make good points.

“The only time I’ve seen this guy (John Ashcroft) stand up for the Constitution is when he ordered the FBI to stop searching gun files. And to this day the FBI has not been allowed to find out if any of the 19 hijackers had purchased any weapons,” [Moore] said.

So tired. So very, very tired. How is it possible to rebut everything? Even someone setting out to be sceptical, like Nyburg is, will eventually start letting some of this stuff pass. The thing is, I know you’ll be shocked to hear this, but I’m passing familiar with the issue and it’s not as simple as Michael Moore reckons. I know, I know, stop the presses. Not that Ashcroft is anyone’s ACLU attorney, but… oh, just read the link. I’m going to the bar.

You know, back in my lefty heyday, one of the things I esteemed the most highly about my chosen political backwater was that we felt obliged to take a nuanced view of things, consider both sides of issues, avoid sloganeering, and so forth. Let me tell you: it seems like a long, long time ago.

Part of one familiar, naggingly insistent narrative reconstruction of the 2000 election involves the giant mess that was voter registration in Florida. I’m always somewhat irked by claims that this was a Republican (or exclusively Republican, at any rate) dirty-tricks campaign, and am a bit more sympathetic to, for instance, Dave Kopel‘s analysis. (Scroll down to “Deceit 4”.) Maybe it’s just because he seems a bit more, I don’t know, nuanced. Maybe it’s because he shouts less.

Anyway, I think it’s always valuable to be reminded that electoral fraud is
a thoroughly bipartisan issue. And this story is especially funny, because it features crack, and crack is funny.

(If you didn’t read it already, Kopel’s monograph is good level-headed stuff, the kind of thing we could use more of. If the only person I’d heard criticizing Fahrenheit 9/11 was Ann Coulter, I’d probably assume it was righteous as well.)

(It hardly needs to be said, but the hat tip goes to Hit and Run. Their headline is better, too.)

I missed the Edwards rally because, well, I think I’ve heard all the slogans he has to offer at this point. (“I was brought up in the light from the TV of America. But that light is flickering! America needs basic cable! Under our administration, America will be able to get HBO!”) But intrepid photojournalist Blog was up in Portland for our edification.

Praise the Lord, voter-registration season is over. I am sick unto death of people asking me if I’m registered yet. I am sick of explaining to people that I’m not a citizen. After a while, I started just saying “no” and glaring. Then I started claiming to be a felon. Then I started telling them that voting was for losers, and that violent revolutionary change was the only way forward. In all, I’m glad the deadline for registration has passed before this process could evolve any further.

Of course, had I the great responsibility of casting a ballot in this fine republic, I have no idea where I’d cast it. My Bush animus shows quite a bit – in short, the phrase “culture of life” brings me out in a rash – but in fairness I’ve noticed that the applause lines of Kerry’s speeches tend to have me knocking my head against the bar, as well, beginning with “I will not privatize Social Security!” at the convention. Now, I don’t seriously expect either candidate to do anything to fix, say, Social Security – but when it’s an applause line, something has gone wrong somewhere.

And on the wonderful things that Kerry predicts will follow from a $7 minimum wage, I can’t snark it better than Jacob Sullum:

If the minimum wage can work this sort of magic, why not raise it to $100 an hour? Then everyone would be well-off, with plenty of spending cash to stimulate the economy.[Yes, it’s a reductio ad absurdum. Don’t care. Still funny. – ed.]

A hypothetical vote for Kerry would, then, have me hoping for him to win and then be completely ineffective in office, which seems unsatisfactory to me. On the other hand, a Republican Congress would presumably grow some teeth with a Democrat in the White House. (I can’t believe No Child Left Behind would have passed in this scenario.)

Mmph. I know some of the answers already, but I’d be curious to know how you denizens of our comment sections are planning to vote. After all, in your cases it’s actually a meaningful decision.

Check out the lede from this blas�story about last nights debate

“Vice President Dick Cheney called himself “a pretty angry father” on Thursday after Sen. John Kerry mentioned their gay daughter during the final presidential debate — comments Kerry said were meant to be positive about families with gay children.”

Wow. There’s so much I didn’t know about the candidates.

With the help of Jared over at the Emerald, I found this Register Guard story that implies that we are intolerant, hate-mongering homophobes. Guess who supplied the information.

Quote: Toby Hill-Meyer, another member of the city work group, has encountered more direct ridicule as a result of gender identity. A student government senator at the UO, Hill-Meyer was recently mocked in The Commentator, a conservative student newspaper on campus, that used vulgar language in a person-on-the-street parody.

Since when is penis vulgar?

The City Museum of Washington has pulled a nude painting of President Bush from its Funky Furniture exhibit. Painting here.

Perhaps the painting was pulled not because it was mildly offensive, but because it was terrible. Look at Cheney. Why does he have that under bite? Is his jaw afflicted with Gout? Compare this painting to the painting on which it is based, Manets Olympia.

Since when did museums even consider displaying crappy editorial cartoons? Does this mean that Steve Baggs will have a future in the New York City art world?

[via Drudge]

Riddle me this: which words is the ODE going to extraordinary lengths to avoid using in the following excerpt from an otherwise blah story concerning a minor infringement of state law? Here‘s a clue.

Senator Toby Hill-Meyer was unaware that the executive sessions were a violation of the law, the senator said. Because they were held to discuss hiring practices, Hill-Meyer was under the impression that the executive sessions were “implicit,” the sentator [sic] said.

Good job, that sub-editor. The deliberate typo is a particularly nice touch, used as it was in many ancient cultures to convey disrespect. (Which is why you see so many of them around here, obviously.)

But how will Hill-Meyer respond? Well, you’ll have to ask hir.

YAR! THAR SHE BLOWS! This isn’t anywhere close to the 1980 explosion, and no stubborn old man was killed, but that’s still pretty cool. Blog has more.