Corsi is going to hand someone in Kenya a check for $1000? Pray tell, what is the gentleman supposed to do with a check drawn on a US bank - find some tobacco and use it as rolling paper?

I run a project with sub-contractors in a dozen African countries, including Kenya. Let me tell you, if I could just send checks, my life would be a whole lot less complicated. There are only two realistic ways to transfer money between the US and Kenya, my friends. One is a bank wire transfer. The other is to carry cash.

But if you bring a US check to a foreign country, you are going to be laughed at by every bank teller you meet. Either Corsi is completely clueless, or he has no intention of actually parting with the thousand bucks. How cruel to dangle so much money in the face of a poor man. What a cheap, cheapskate political stunt.

Not to mention that the airfare from the US is at least $2000, and that's for economy class. Add in the Nairobi Hilton and meals in some swank downtown restaurants, and Corsi will be tossing multiples more money on his own creature comforts than he will be attempting to deliver to the victim of his vampire attack.

Thanks for another useful column, Patrick. Your essays ought to be available in a magazine rack by the door of every plane.

Pilots start doing go-arounds from almost their first lesson in a single engine prop plane. I remember being shown a go-around one of the first times I was belted in next to an instructor. As soon as I started learning how to land, I learned to be on a hair trigger for my instructor to call out "go around, go around, go around." Sometimes that call would come when I was just settling into the final descent, sometimes it would happen when I was flared a foot above the runway, sometimes when I was already on the ground.

As a result of this training, pilots learn to execute go-arounds as a reflex reaction. You recognize the need for a go-around, and you execute what is basically a mid-air take-off. You learn that there is no shame in a missed approach - nobody will ever question your decision to exercise caution.

This go-around training really comes into its own when you start learning to do cross-wind landings in heavy gusts. Cross-wind landings involve flying the plane to the runway at an angle to the centerline, touching down on one wheel with one wing pointed toward the ground, then swiveling the nose to have a straight roll down the runway. Many a time did I try setting up for a cross-wind landing only to find that I was being blown to the left or right of the pavement, or the gusts at the moment were too strong for my skill level. No sweat - just do a go-around and try again.

The only time that the go-around approach doesn't work is with gliders, since you don't have a power source to institute a climb-out. Where a power-plane just does a go-around, a glider pilot will be looking for buddies to help him drag his plane out of the cow pasture short of the landing strip, while the date he was trying to impress picks her way through meadow muffins in her leather pumps. In any other situation, the only worry you have in a missed approach is whether you'll make your connection once you are safely in the terminal.

The real problem that we Jewish men are having with the Obama campaign is that they are completely sold out of Obama-kahs.

http://jewsforobama.blogspot.com/2008/10/sold-out-of-obama-kahs.html

This is such a great head piece, I wish I could get Bar Mitzvah all over again.

Will the War Room page automatically refresh on me after 10 minutes, cutting off my connection?

Am I the only one who hears the bang bang bang of pictures with Obama in the middle, then the quick cut to pictures of automatic weapons, and connects the two?

I am not a paranoid conspiracy freak. And I wasn't expecting to see much in this ad other than the usual rehash of McCain lies. But I gotta say, the message that hit me over the head with this one was to get out your assault rifles, my friends, and go shoot yourself one uppity n______.

@hydrox85, you are absolutely right. The text is positioned and lit so that the word that jumps out at you is BLACKS.

I don't know why so many people are reacting to this ad so blandly. This is the most dangerous, underhanded commercial I have ever seen. The not-so-subliminal message is that Obama is a very dangerous BLACK man who should be shot.

This ad is incitement to violence by the Timothy McVeigh set. McCain should be prosecuted for putting his name to it.

The one place in which I am worried that the polls are under-estimating the Republican vote is from absentee military ballots. As we know, those were enough to make the difference in Florida in 2000. They are also a substantial factor in Virginia and North Carolina.

We can be sure that the polling agencies are not sampling our service people overseas, so that demo is not being counted in the poll results. We also know that military voters have historically gone for the Republicans for quite some time. What we do not know is (a) whether the levels of support for Republicans has fallen as that party has kept our troops overseas and dieing for so long, or (b) whether potential high levels of Repub support among overseas military could be enough to tip the balance in one or more states.