Last Call

Dear God, just no.

In the final days of the campaign in Ohio, the stops have been pulled out in the scramble to eke out a win. And that means one super PAC calling on African Americans to vote against President Obama because Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.

Cable viewers in several markets across the state are being treated to ads by an obscure self-described “alternative conservative” super PAC called the Empower Citizens Network. One of the group’s ads accuses Obama and Democrats of imploding the economy by forcing mortgage companies to lend to “unqualified borrowers” while the Soviet national anthem plays. Another promises welfare recipients that “Republicans can save your money source” by reducing regulations on business.

And then there’s the ad which one viewer told TPM is airing in the Columbus area on cable. Our source caught it a couple of times on MSNBC. That ad is the Empower Citizens Network spot that tells African Americans it’s a “lie” that Democrats support them and cites the Emancipation Proclamation as evidence. 

Ahh yes, the "Listen up you stupid black people, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican!" argument.  Which might be successful except for all the Republicans since Abraham Lincoln being assholes, particularly Nixon, Reagan, and Bush and son.  So we're going to go with "No, stop being a condescending jagoff."

Nice try, however.  Next time, try not to pass laws that make it harder for African-Americans to vote at all in an obvious attempt to disenfranchise us, shall we?

We Interrupt Your Chris Christie Lovefest...

...for the fact that just a week before Hurricane Sandy completely slagged his state and he came crawling on his hands and knees to praise the man, this is what Chris Christie thought of the President.



Just some perspective on what the "bipartisan" Christie really thinks.  The guy went down to Virginia to stump for Romney and called the President "useless" and "arrogant".

But he sure came hat in hand when New Jersey needs millions, maybe billions in federal government dollars to clean up from this mess.  You sure need the federal government now, don't you, Chris?

Trust me.  People will remember.

ODS Is All They Got Left

The Romney plan to win Ohio?  Obama Derangement Syndrome, sold door-to-door.  Meet Jim Lewis, who's happy to show you his Glock with his concealed carry permit.

Lewis and his fellow activist Ann Becker are a new breed of canvassers going door to door along a sloping street full of modest and mostly well-kept homes in this declining steel town in Butler County. This is the first presidential election since the founding of the Tea Party movement which aims to reduce the size of U.S. government.

The two activists are not beholden to any campaign - some would say they are a rogue force - nor do they mention Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney by name.

While they differ with former Massachusetts governor Romney on many policies and suspect his conservative credentials, they are working independently to help him win over undecided voters in swing states such as Ohio.

Fiercely opposed to the reelection of Democratic President Barack Obama, conservatives are trying to employ technology they used successfully earlier this year in a recall vote in Wisconsin to help Romney overcome Obama's narrow Ohio lead in the polls.

Conservative group American Majority Action trains volunteers such as Lewis and Becker to target "low-propensity" voters, or people who are not very interested in politics. They use Gravity, a mobile get-out-the-vote app that aims to filter out regular Republican voters and those who have already voted.

"I'm not doing this for Romney or the Republicans," said Chris Littleton, who is training some 50 volunteers to use the app. "I'm doing this because I'm against Obama."

And in the end, that's all they have.   I'm against Obama.  It doesn't matter what Romney's policies actually are:  I'm against Obama, he says.

You should demand more from your ability to vote.

Gmail Beats Hotmail For #1

Google's Gmail is top dog in e-mail, according to ComScore, which tracks Web site traffic.

In data for October released by ComScore, Gmail saw 287.9 million unique worldwide visitors during the period, edging out Microsoft's Hotmail, which finished with 286.2 million unique visitors. The findings were first reported by GigaOm.

Yahoo still leads in the US and by a large amount.  Frankly, I'm surprised.  I'm also surprised Google is just now passing for number one.  I thought that happened sometime ago and had been verified.  I have nothing against Hotmail or Yahoo, but I have used every major (and most minor) services out there and nothing ever compared to Gmail.  It hooked me immediately, it was the rest of Google's services that took time to win me over.

What say you, readers?  Am I missing some awesome Hotmail or Yahoo feature?  Or is it more a not-Google thing?

Rock Solid Halloween Costume

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was mostly ready for his Halloween costume, but seriously... this is great.

Thank you, TMZ!

Unleash Joe Biden: Equality Edition

Joe Biden's campaign stops are always amusing...and very informative as well.

Vice President Joe Biden said transgender discrimination is "the civil rights issue of our time" during a visit to a Florida field office on Tuesday, according to pool reports.

Biden was meeting with volunteers at an Obama for America office in Sarasota, Fla., when he singled out one woman "who he thought had beautiful eyes," reads the pool report. The woman said something to Biden that was inaudible to the pool reporter, but Biden responded to her by saying it was the "civil rights issue of our time."

The woman, Linda Carragher Bourne of Sarasota, later said her daughter was Miss Trans New England and that she had asked Biden if he would help them.

"A lot of my friends are being killed, and they don't have the civil rights yet. These guys are gonna make it happen," Bourne told the reporter.

Good for Joe...because he's right.  The T in LGBTQ often gets overlooked.  Joe Biden and his boss?  These are the guys leading the fight on this.  Mitt Romney sure as hell would never say anything like this.

The vice president has been an ally to the LGBT community. He told gay rights advocates in August that they are "freeing the soul of the American people." Most notably, however, he got out in front of President Barack Obama in May when he unexpectedly announced that he is "absolutely comfortable" with same-sex marriage. Obama, at the time, was still "evolving" on the issue. 

Pretty sure Joe's ahead of the game on this one too...but it's a good thing.

Food For Thoughtless

Mitt Romney is the most fakiest fake faking fake person ever.  Remember that "canceled campaign event" that became a "storm relief event" in Dayton on Tuesday?

The plan was for supporters to bring hurricane relief supplies to the event, and then deliver the bags of canned goods, packages of diapers, and cases of water bottles to the candidate, who would be perched behind a table along with a slew of volunteers and his Ohio right-hand man, Senator Rob Portman. To complete the project and photo-op, Romney would lead his crew in carrying the goods out of the gymnasium and into the Penske rental truck parked outside.

But the last-minute nature of the call for donations left some in the campaign concerned that they would end up with an empty truck. So the night before the event, campaign aides went to a local Wal Mart and spent $5,000 on granola bars, canned food, and diapers to put on display while they waited for donations to come in, according to one staffer. (The campaign confirmed that it "did donate supplies to the relief effort," but would not specify how much it spent.)

Shut.  The front.  Door.

Just another photo op for Mitt, who wouldn't know how to handle a disaster if one landed on his face.  Case in point:  his campaign.

This guy's about as Presidential as a used car salesman.

StupidiNews!

• The US death toll from Sandy is up to 56, with 124 dead across North America from the storm as millions remain without power for a fourth day.
• Four people were wounded in a late night shooting on the campus of the University of Southern California, with the suspect now in custody.
• California Democrats want a probe into possible campaign finance law violations by former GOP Lt. Gov. Luis Maldonado, now running for Congress.
• Sandy's impact on the Northeast may cost the country a half a percentage point in GDP growth in the 4th quarter.
• Google's Nexus 7 tablet has done well in sales, but not as well as the search giant was hoping against new tablets from Amazon and Apple.

Last Call

Here's your scary Halloween story for the night:  The Most Wrong Man In America is predicting a Romney landslide.  And he actually used the term “landslide”.

Voters have figured out that President Obama has no message, no agenda and not even much of an explanation for what he has done over the past four years. His campaign is based entirely on persuading people that Mitt Romney is a uniquely bad man, entirely dedicated to the rich, ignorant of the problems of the average person. As long as he could run his negative ads, the campaign at least kept voters away from the Romney bandwagon. But once we all met Mitt Romney for three 90-minute debates, we got to know him — and to like him. He was not the monster Obama depicted, but a reasonable person for whom we could vote.

You have to love his awesome little bubble of unreality.

Or will the Romney momentum grow and wash into formerly safe Democratic territory in New Jersey and Oregon?

Nice choice of phrase, Dick.  And sure, Romney will get 350 EVs because ARGLE AND THE BLARGLE.  Even better, he’s calling for the GOP to pick up six Senate seats in the wake of Romney’s long, long coattails.

I mean, why wouldn’t we give Morris the benefit of the doubt over Nate Silver or this empty can of Diet Coke with Lime?  Morris has a long, long track record of being completely full of garbage.  But it’s a long track record, so Nate Silver is a wimp because SHUT UP LIBTARDS.

So yes, now that Toesucker here has called it for Romney, President Obama is spiking that there football.

Scary stuff.

Rocked You Like A Hurricane

I'm going to have to agree with Alyssa Rosenberg about the morbid practice of sending reporters into storms.

There was something supremely strange yesterday about the spectacle of CNN’s chief business correspondent, Ali Velshi, standing outside in Atlantic City and getting battered by the rain from Hurricane Sandy. It’s odd enough that news networks drop all other subjects, foreign and domestic, when a big storm bears down on the U.S. (not that such storms shouldn’t be covered). But there’s something particularly strange about the decision to focus on on-the-ground reporters, rather than on reporting on actual disaster management, most of the decisions about which are made inside government and non-profit offices, rather than at the edge of bodies of water. And it’s particularly strange that we’ve focused on making reporters take risks that carry with them very little possible information reward.

And of course it's not the information reward that matters,we just like seeing the poor miserable people on the TV screen get blown around and occasionally they might even die or something.  We're ghouls on Halloween.



CHUNKY. 

Guys This Is Quality Denial Here, Not That Cheap Crap

The wingers have their new marching orders for the rest of the week:  early voting numbers that favor the Democrats don't matter, because SHUT UP LIBTARDS.

Democrats more than Republicans are getting their most loyal supporters to vote early, but with polls showing a close race among those who have voted so far, concerns are being raised about a GOP tsunami on the actual Election Day, next Tuesday.

According to a GOP analysis of early voting and absentee ballot requests provided to Secrets, the Democrats are turning out their most reliable, or so-called "high propensity voters" than Republicans, leaving fewer for Election Day. The GOP is pushing weaker supporters to vote early, expecting high enthusiasm to drive their regular supporters to the polls next week.

And on Election Day, no Democrats will actually vote. 

From the beginning, I've questioned the strategic choices of the Romney campaign. I think they've made dozens of wrongheaded decisions. They have completely failed to emphasize certain issues which would've helped them with key constituencies, they've reacted in knee jerk fashion to attacks, and they allowed Romney to be defined negatively in the late summer in a way which could still prove too large an obstacle to overcome. But as much as I question their strategic minds, it's been clear from day one that Romney's operational prowess is second to none, and getting out the vote isn't a question of strategy but operation. Even given that the state Republican parties are shouldering much of this effort, and even given all the advantages Team Obama was likely to have in that arena, if Team Romney could end up close to matching them in this respect, we could be looking at an undertow election like none we've seen before. This would reflect not so much a groundswell as a cave-in, one where independents did not shift to Romney but away from Obama, where the bottom truly drops out of the Obama effort, and the story the left focuses on for the next year is why in the world those people stayed home.

So yeah, Republicans figure all of us are going to just not bother to show up and let the GOP run the country into the ground.  This is in fact their master plan for winning next week.

This is really their entire plan.  If you consider all the voter intimidation and suppression, it's literally their entire plan.

Luckily, we actually can do something about it.

Privacy Stupidity - Who Needs Warrants?

CNET has learned that U.S. District Judge William Griesbach ruled that it was reasonable for Drug Enforcement Administration agents to enter rural property without permission -- and without a warrant -- to install multiple "covert digital surveillance cameras" in hopes of uncovering evidence that 30 to 40 marijuana plants were being grown.

This is the latest case to highlight how advances in technology are causing the legal system to rethink how Americans' privacy rights are protected by law. In January, the Supreme Court rejected warrantless GPS tracking after previously rejecting warrantless thermal imaging, but it has not yet ruled on warrantless cell phone tracking or warrantless use of surveillance cameras placed on private property without permission.

Yesterday Griesbach adopted a recommendation by U.S. Magistrate Judge William Callahan dated October 9. That recommendation said that the DEA's warrantless surveillance did not violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and requires that warrants describe the place that's being searched.

"The Supreme Court has upheld the use of technology as a substitute for ordinary police surveillance," Callahan wrote.

Dangerous precedents are being set and upheld.  I don't want to get all tinfoil hat on you, but if we don't get some protection from our own government and police, we will never enjoy a private conversation again. This is unforgivable.

Stupidity Begets Stupidity

The child was hit with the taser probes during a demonstration earlier this year at Tularosa Elementary School, where Officer Christopher Webb spoke to groups of students in the school playground about gun and taser safety.

While Webb claimed the taser “accidentally discharged,” the victim’s lawyers charge that the cop was recklessly joking around with students when the boy was struck with two electrified barbs.

Webb reportedly asked a group of students who would like to clean his patrol unit. While a group of boys said they would, the victim--identified as “R.D.” by his lawyers--“jokingly said that he did not want to clean the patrol unit,” according to a Santa Fe District Court lawsuit.

In response, Webb allegedly pointed his taser at the boy and said, “Let me show you what happens to people who do not listen to the police.” The 44-year-old cop then fired his Taser X26 model.

You can't make this stuff up, folks.  The lawsuit seems a bit dramatic, but holy cow... what cop says something like that and fires a weapon at a child?  Aren't you always supposed to treat your weapon like it's loaded?

Idiot.  Jackass.

Snow White And The Seven Jawas

And Disney has bought Lucasfilm LTD for $4 billion and change, with the promise of a seventh Star Wars film in 2015.

Disney has acquired Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion. The film studio was previously owned entirely by George Lucas, the creator of the iconic Star Wars and Indiana Jones series. Lucas will continue to work at Lucasfilm, serving as creative consultant.

Star Wars: Episode 7 is planned for release in 2015, followed by Episodes 8 and 9. Disney hopes to continue releasing new Star Wars feature films every two to three years.

“For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next,” Lucas said in a statement. “It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers. I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime.”

Lucas said he was confident that Kathleen Kennedy, the current co-chairman of Lucasfilm, will continue to successfully expand the franchise after becoming the new president of the film studio. Kennedy will report to Walt Disney Studios Chairman Alan Horn.

“Disney’s reach and experience give Lucasfilm the opportunity to blaze new trails in film, television, interactive media, theme parks, live entertainment, and consumer products,” Lucas added.

It can't be worse than midichlorians, pod racing, and Jar-Jar Binks. I say, bring it.

The Kitchen Sink

Democratic party aligned Super PAC American Bridge takes off the gloves and goes right after tying Mitt Romney to the more odious Republican opinions on women.

The American Bridge spot ties Romney to Rep. Todd Akin's (R-MO) "legitmate rape" comment (used to justify oppostion to aboriton rights in the case of rape), Rep. Joe Walsh's (R-IL) contention that a woman's life cannot be at risk due pregnancy (used to justify health exemptions for a total ban on abortion rights) and Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock's line about rape, conception and God's will. Viewers are directed to Bridge's BindersFullOfWomen.com microsite, which includes more videos on GOP positions on rape and abortion.

Romney favors eceptions to abortion bans in the case of rape, incest and when the mother's life is at risk, but his attempts to moderate himself against the most conservative voices in his party on the issue have been difficult thanks to the Akins and Mourdocks of the world as the Bridge ad illustrates.

You think?

And no, there's no daylight between Mitt and Todd Akin or Richard Mourdock.  Mitt Romney himself has made that perfectly clear.