What you need to do right now is just drop everything and head on over to Glenn Greenwald's thread today. I do believe he's addressing the very idea you're pushing.

What a fabulous coincidence. Go make one of your typical 1000-word-filler, 10-words-substance posts over there about this, and I'll go get some popcorn.

I dunno. I watched them all and didn't find them to be particularly good. Couple of minor high points here and there, but the material they're imitating (the bazillion two-guy beer commercials), you generally expect those to be funny, so it's perhaps more jarring when these aren't.

And the "what's wrong with McCain" feels pasted on at the end. Although it seems like slightly different takes on the line, there should have been very different takes on the line and a better segue into it.

I think I'd have much preferred a commercial that showed and didn't tell. The one about "panic" was closest to this, and the best one. I'd like to see a J6P in a bar, watching other J6Ps getting really ugly and nasty at the TV about Obama and McCain, and you see that it somehow finally crosses a line for him, and he quietly gets up and leaves the bar. Maybe you show him going home and doing something like deciding to vote for Obama.

For that matter, I'd really like to see some of those evangelical commericals where they show people kind of waking up and seeing the light--except in this one the person recognizes that one side's preaching hate and the other isn't, and that the advertised religion isn't about hate. Gotta love the religious silence on this point to date, regardless of wing.

Think I'll be waiting on that kind of commercial for a while.

An important symbolic moment in the campaign came when word seeped out that Obama was buying ads in video games -- an epic illustration of too much money chasing too few undecided voters.

I don't necessarily disagree, but the more epic illustration of that would be the campaign's buying of an entire Dish Network channel running a maybe 15-minute loop of campaign ads 24/7, which as of tonight is still broadcasting.

I saw the video game buy as more somebody actually using their noggin, although not perhaps as well as they could have. If I recall the buy was on billboards in some Xbox 360 multiplayer racing game. That's just a case of right church, but the wrong pew. Imagine getting some kind of ad in one of these MMOs frequented by millions, where political flame wars rage over the chat channels night and day. They screwed the pooch on the specifics, not on the general concept of buying ads in games.

To more illustrate that point, imagine the McCain campaign with 10x the money it had, and as desperate for votes as it is. Think they'd have even THOUGHT of buying ads in games?

Fuck no.

So that's more what it symbolizes to me. Somebody actually trying to think outside the box in a way that could work. As such it's a whole lot more symbolic of the entire Obama campaign to me.

I suppose it could be argued that the Palin pick was also outside the box thinking, but smell the aroma of that. Kind of has those subtle undertones of flailing desperation, don't it?

The meanings of 14 and 88 are listed at the ADL website link helpfully provided right there in the story.

Yep, that's the one I hate the most too.

"throw under the bus" is a pretty close second.

It's just bitchin'. There's really no emphasis made on your character being female whatsoever. In fact your identity at all is not really a point of plot or gameplay, and it's rare that you even have an opportunity to see that you are female as the player, given that it's first-person.

Great game, though. Definitely worth a look.

Derbig, in relation to your Wallaby response several pages back, that's almost certainly the latest incarnation of "Electro". It doesn't take long to spot his latest handle if you read more than GG's letters section. He does drive-bys on all of them, and the fist (or style, what have you) is fairly unmistakable. "Zyklon-B" is/was also almost certainly him.

I let my subscription lapse and I have no intention of renewing it until Salon does something more about policing or providing more tools for the letters sections so that they don't become playgrounds for the mentally ill, like that guy. GG is about the only one who takes it seriously, and it's appreciated.

I've long since given up reading the Paglia articles. But the letters thread which inevitably follows is simply not to be missed. Pass the popcorn.

LOVE that show! Didn't know the interminable wait was at an end!

Your picture link wasn't working for me. Could be just where I'm surfing from. Anybody else?

I'm ex-field artillery. What it generally looks like when airburst isn't much at first. Small white poof where it went off, but the giveaway is that you can see what look like fragments streaming smoke behind them (they're felt wedges impregnated with the stuff). A few seconds later, after the wedges have dispersed, it blossoms into immense, solid white clouds of smoke, as if a thunderhead cloud were sitting on the ground.

Yep, that second link worked, thanks. I'm not sure what that is. It could be a different kind of round than the ones I was familiar with. The one on the right looks much more like a WP airburst of the type I used to see, but the photograph is taken before the clouds have formed, probably within 2-3 seconds of the right side burst occurring. The one on the left--don't know. The initial trails weren't usually that dramatically bright. But again, could very well be a different kind of round I didn't fire in my brief tenure, or something new in the last decade or so.