They might as well call this guy "Charlie Jones." He's not James Bond. James was NOT an action hero. He tried hard not to use violence as it risked getting his tuxedo mussed up, used it as a last resort and topped it off with a wry quip. He loved women (where are the women??) and his villains were over-the-top comic psychos intent on some impossibly outlandish dream of power. There was a sense of humor to the whole thing, you always knew the sharks weren't going to get Bond. The gadgets were fun and perfectly integrated into the narrative; the car chases were exhilarating (they didn't make your eyeballs ache) and Bond was the guy who was always ready for whatever came his way. Now it's just running, jumping and sweating, blowing things up, no women, no villains, no planetary-power schemes. If you like that kind of thing, it's a well-made Nonstop Action Movie. But don't call this James Bond, 'cause it ain't.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: anyone with an ounce of instruction in, and appreciation for, history -- anyone who has immersed him/herself in it far enough to have felt, even for a moment, what it was like to live in times when to travel fifty miles was a serious labor, when to travel across a continent was an almost unthinkable series of hardships -- would STFU about the inconveniences of flying in the jet age.

Lieberman's committee, under his leadership, gave Bush a pass on every crime and misdemeanor. That's nonfeasance, pure and simple. And reason enough to put someone else in the chair.

When American presidents were given this capacity, one doubts it was ever intended to extend to members of a president's self-same administration, for crimes against basic humanity or crimes against the Constitution itself.

Honey. Angel-puss. The election's over. Go home.

As Josh Marshall at TPM puts it (on 11/8/08): "...there's a surfeit of reasons to strip Sen. Lieberman of his committee chairmanship...Simply put, he was terrible at it. Lieberman's committee is the senate investigations and oversight committee...Even in the face of endless scandals of the late Bush administration, Lieberman couldn't find anything worth poking into."

Appoint Patrick Smith head of the FAA.

If John McCain had gotten a mohawk haircut in September, it would've given his campaign a temporary boost simply because of the outrageousness of it, the way it played into the "maverick" meme. At the end of the day, though, it wouldn't have meant much. Sic transit Sarah.

It's encouraging to see that these proto-fascists learned nothing from Obama's victory, nothing about the American people's distaste for and intolerance of the politics of smear and hate. Anything to keep them on the margins...

Are you taking into account that the polls will still be open for another three hours in California? Are the networks or AP allowed to "call" the election, or even talk about exit polls in Eastern states, while the polls are open out West?

McCain is going to get millions and millions of votes. We can't convince everyone. Also, people in battleground states have been campaigned half to death, robocalled and polled to within an inch of their lives. I don't know where the writer was calling from, but we hosted a MoveOn calling party last week and the biggest challenge was getting people in those states to pick up their phones at all. Of the six or seven hundred calls we made, maybe ten percent -- probably less -- were answered by live human beings. And they were all MoveOn members, not a hostile enemy agent in the bunch. Still, they were watching their caller I.D. because in PA and CO and NV they had been targeted so much already.

All of which is to say, let's not get complacent, let's get out the vote to be sure, but keep telling ourselves, "We only have to win by one vote (figuratively speaking)."

The McCain campaign loses ground every time they use a negative angle on Obama -- not even because there isn't a there, there, but because people are sick of the ugliness -- and yet they just keep on keepin' on with the smears, the slams, gleefully pointing out the little dingleberries anyone's accumulated in their life after 46 years but which have nothing to do with presidentiality. How can they not get it after all this time, all this backsliding??

The campaign is nearing its climax. The denouement comes after.

WaPo article about "election day meltdown" of voter-suppression efforts and concomitant lawsuits paints a frightening picture.

If Sarah Palin is the big centerpiece of Republican hopes for the future, then it's going to be a loooong time in the wilderness for those folks.

"...her greatest unstated challenge: making more voters comfortable with the idea of a black first lady ..."

And she can be thankful to one person for paving the way in front of her: Oprah Winfrey

By 2012, she might be caught up enough with world news and English grammar to garner a chair on "The View" or maybe even her own cable show (that's a stretch). But...a political future? Nah.

I think you got the speakers' names crossed up in that last exchange between McCain (alleged) and the 911 operator.

That insult to Lech Walesa was unconscionable!

The pollsters are going to be out of a job in a very short time, or at least seriously downsizing after the Crazy Season. Their motivation today, to the extent they can "calibrate the horse race," is to keep it as close and breathtaking as they can, making their services that much more "necessary" -- it's called making hay while the sun shines.