Over at BoingBoing, we have our attention called to a video wherein Republican vice-presidential nominee complains that Obama will create a socialist state wherein our very freedoms are endangered.

Really? That’s the line you’re going with? Well, Harper’s writer Scott Horton has a bit to say about that:

Does Sarah mean a state:

• That snatches its victims off the street, denies them all form of legal process and whisks them away to secret “blacksites” where they can be tortured using all the techniques described in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon?

• That arrests and prosecutes its political adversaries for imaginary crimes so as to eliminate them from the running in election cycles in which they could do some damage?

• That destroys the careers of professional military men because they got promotions under a prior regime and therefore considers them disloyal?

• That believes it can detain and hold its enemies forever without any charges or any evidence against them, denying them access to courts to prove their innocence?

Because, Sarah, that’s what your party has done for us in just 8 short years.

Remember this? It’s been 8 years. Why not check and see Wassup in 2008? (Widely linked.)

This is fucking priceless:

I’ve been saying bad things about Sarah Palin before right now in the past ago. But that’s only because I thought she was an unqualified, passive-aggressive, hypocritical cunt.

However, I was hit over the head 11 times with an amber paperweight this morning. Then, seventeen minutes ago, I got my head trapped in a big plastic bag, and was not able to get any oxygen into my breath-hole for several minutes. And then I paid the mailman to give me a screwdriver lobotomy.

And so now I see things different and also clearer than before back then.

For first things, everyone who’s laughing about her on the TV with Couric needs to understand that, when it comes to the country’s money and bank outlook, we need to consider what Sarah said about jobs making and also the shoring up of our proud country and the mountains of glory and tradition that we, as a people, have forever held. And don’t forget the health care which for the body of Americans as people and as a whole is critical. Do you remember the people who died in the towers?

It keeps going. Go read the whole thing.

GOP fucktards have stolen or vandalized at least three Obama signs from my brother’s yard; amusingly, this made the local TV news.

Ron Howard would like to talk to you about this election.

Eric Hirshberg over at Huffington Post has a post up, with video, about Conservatives for Change. Watch the video. There’s more at ConservativesForChange.com.

Some of the links on the photo essay I posted earlier have broken; here’s a link to the directory with the photos themselves.

Photojournalist Callie Shell has been following the Obama campaign since the primaries. She’s done some extraordinary work. They’re all good, but there’s something about this one that really gets me.

Following up, I’ll add this mashup someone put together combining one of Shell’s shots with one of Governor Palin and the widely-reported information about the RNC’s $150,000 makeover of the Palin clan.

This is awesome and completely correct:

First, they had their shot at holding power, and they failed. They’ve failed in staying true to their principles of limited government and free markets. They’ve failed in preventing elected leaders of their party from becoming corrupted by the trappings of power, and they’ve failed to hold those leaders accountable after the fact. Congressional Republicans failed to rein in the Bush administration’s naked bid to vastly expand the power of the presidency (a failure they’re going to come to regret should Obama take office in January). They failed to apply due scrutiny and skepticism to the administration’s claims before undertaking Congress’ most solemn task—sending the nation to war. I could go on.

As for the Bush administration, the only consistent principle we’ve seen from the White House over the last eight years is that of elevating the American president (and, I guess, the vice president) to that of an elected dictator. That isn’t hyperbole. This administration believes that on any issue that can remotely be tied to foreign policy or national security (and on quite a few other issues as well), the president has boundless, limitless, unchecked power to do anything he wants. They believe that on these matters, neither Congress nor the courts can restrain him.

That’s the second reason the GOP needs to lose. American voters need to send a clear, convincing repudiation of these dangerous ideas.

FiveThirtyEight.com is the most interesting electoral stats site out there this campaign season, and it should be, given its author’s statistical pedigree. Nate Silver’s day job is in the rarefied world of baseball stats; he works for Baseball Prospectus, who, according to the linked story, have “a reputation in sports-media circles for being unfailingly rigorous, occasionally arrogant, and almost always correct.”

A little background:

The site earned some national recognition back in May, during the Democratic primaries, when almost every other commentator was celebrating Hillary Clinton’s resurgent momentum. Reading the polls, most pundits predicted she’d win Indiana by five points and noted she’d narrowed the gap with Obama in North Carolina to just eight.

Silver, who was writing anonymously as “Poblano” and receiving about 800 visits a day, disagreed with this consensus. He’d broken the numbers down demographically and come up with a much less encouraging outcome for Clinton: a two-point squeaker in Indiana, and a seventeen-point drubbing in North Carolina. On the night of the primaries, Clinton took Indiana by one and lost North Carolina by fifteen. The national pundits were doubly shocked: one, because the results were so divergent from the polls, and two, because some guy named after a chili pepper had predicted the outcome better than anyone else.

Silver and his colleagues, for example, were virtually alone in predicting that now-World Series bound Tampa would win 90 games this year.

Silver’s current projection is a 344 to 193 electoral vote victory for Obama, with 51.1% of the popular vote. Overall, he sees a 93.4% chance of an Obama victory. It changes slightly every day, as his models incorporate more and newer data.

The immediate post-event spin on Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama? Powell’s a racist; them darkies stick together. You can’t make this shit up.

The only reason I keep putting things like this up here is, clearly, because I hate you all.

At YesWeCarve.com, you can see excellent examples of Barackolanterns, and download stencils to make your own. (Thanks, Miche!)

Christopher Buckley, son of right-wing firebrand William F. Buckley, has endorsed Barack Obama.

Of course, he was promptly let go by his father’s magazine as a consequence.

Mr. Buckley said he did not understand the sense of betrayal that some of his conservative colleagues felt, but said that the fury and ugly comments his endorsement generated is “part of the calcification of modern discourse. It’s so angry.” Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan’s quote about the Democrats, Mr. Buckley added, “I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.”

Roseanne Cash tosses her hat in:

In summation, I present myself to the GOP as a woman, and I repeat, woman, who has held a passport for thirty-eight years, a lip gloss-wearing soccer-volleyball-softball-gymnastics mom of five, who can carry a six-pack home to her husband like nobody’s business, whose will is firmly aligned with God’s will, a neo-natal conservative and legally savvy public figure, a border-watching, trigonometry-credited, breastfeeding, BlackBerry-tapping, cat-throwing maverick whose daughters are out of their teens, therefore immune to teenage pregnancy (although this is a private, family matter), and whose dad’s head (or an eerie facsimile) adorns a state airline.

Read the whole thing. It’s hilarious.