Some questions about Palin's qualifications are fine. 10,000 questions about her qualifications, and zero about Obama's ...

Zero media questions about Obama's qualifications?

You so funny. Next you'll be claiming that there's some nasty video of ... oh, let's say it's of his ex-pastor ... than was never shown.

And that there have been some dubious guilt-by-association things from Chicago that have never gotten any coverage.

And so on.

It would have made more sense if Sheriff McCain had an oh-so-apologetic Democratic deputy.

I'm still an Obama supporter, but he and many other Dems did have a role in this, you know.

One might think that winger rhetoric about "activist judges" would have ended after Bush v. Gore. But of course it's not really "activist judges" as such that they have a problem with.

Am I the only one who read the headline of Mr. Greenwald's essay and immediately thought of Mr. Shapiro's recent offering on this very site: "The voters are angry -- and don't know why"?

Or is the implied reference just too obvious to mention?

Let's all start digging up shit about John McCain's family ... or better yet, Cindy McCain's family. How would being the heir of a fortune partly based on criminal behavior affect her husband's presidency? Inquiring minds want to know!

Or, you know, not.

Besides, morale among the staff is up since his posting, particularly among the nurses.

Your analogy is interesting, but I got hung up on this detail.

Nurses would shred a doctor like that.

Nurses can and do put up with a lot of shit from doctors, but they can smell incompetence like it was a used bedpan hidden under a bed.

I do not feel that a union between two same sex people can be called "marriage". Allow those couples the same rights and benefits as everry other couple, plus allow them the same negative aspects of "marriage". But lets not get into a game of semantics.

Proposing that something be treated identically while simultaneously insisting that it be called something different is playing semantics. What you're really asking is that we play the game your way.

This reminds me of the dissenting judicial opinion in the Massachusetts State Supreme Court who used the "what's in a name?" quote to make a similar suggestion. What she'd evidently forgotten was that the quote is from a story where names -- Montague vs Capulet -- made a life-or-death difference.

(And as someone else has already pointed out, we've already tried the so-called "separate but equal" approach. It didn't work so well.)

What's the Diebold Poll say?

(Now that's a real internal poll!)

I knew a lesbian couple that had a child. I saw him at least once a week. When he was about 7, he started asking 'where's my daddy? how come I don't have a daddy?

Sounds like the kid was probably getting rude questions at school.

On the other hand, maybe the government should mandate a father for every family, whether they want one or not. Because it's obvious from this one anecdote that it's absolutely vital for every child to have a penis-equipped adult in their household.

Don't forget the past two presidential elections' exit polls, and how "wrong" they were. I'm not sure the election has to be close to be vulnerable to machinations (pun intended) that flip the outcome. We really need to be ever vigilant, this time, that another elections doesn't get stolen.

Exit polls are less meaningful than the kinds of polls that polling companies do, and much less meaningful than the kinds of polls-of-polls and trend analysis and so on that sites like Pollster and FiveThirtyEight do.

Certainly, the way vote-counting is done in this country is serious flawed -- intentionally so, in some places -- and that really needs to be addressed, along with the various disgusting and un-American block-the-vote tactics that some Repubs engage in. But exit poll analysis is a weak place to start from.

Maybe Sarah Palin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel could get together and chat about weird moments with national leaders.

Somewhere, Carl Sagan and Johnny Carson are having a really fun and interesting conversation.

I don't remember the details, but there's at least one similar federally-funded DNA study going on in Alaska. (Salmon? I forget. Maybe they were studying the DNA of trees cut down to renovate Sen. Steven's house.)

My speculation is that someone's worried about riots if 2008 turns out like 2000. Or worse, if someone does a Sirhan Sirhan on Obama.

(Ye gods, I hate even typing that possibility. It feels like bad luck. Is it just me, or are lots of people mostly trying to not even think about that?)

This DNA study was a fairly important part of an endangered species recovery program.

I figured as much.

I'm sure there are more than a few honestly ridiculous things our taxes pay for. But I hate it when some political weasel picks something to rant against because it sounds crazy rather than because it is crazy.

I blame William Proxmire, that milk-subsidy chugging son-of-a-bitch.

And yet they have a particular scorn for the "politics of victimization". Maybe their objection is really some kind of twisted envy?

Opposing Roe v. Wade is one thing, but Griswold, which -- as Couric correctly pointed out, is the key precedent for Roe -- is something altogether different, and much riskier politically.

What percentage of registered voters in the US have any idea what the Griswold decision was?

Is government part of the problem, or the solution?

Whaddya mean, "or"? It's both. The trick is to shift the ratio so that it plays much more of a role in "the" solution than it plays in "the" problem.

That's my beef with the bailout plan. It certainly doesn't shift that ratio towards solution, and may ultimately make things worse.

"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures." -- Daniel Webster