The pro-McCain rag here in Boston yesterday had the headline "One More Mission" with a picture of McCain on the front page. So Palin was probably just reading from the same talking points they got. At the risk of being a jerk, I would be happy if this mission ended just like his last mission in Vietnam. Down in flames.

In other news, (OMG! LOL!) did anyone else happen to see that Joe the Plumber is getting in fights with angry Democrat plumbers? Somebody call Mario and Luigi, its a plumber smackdown!

I checked out that website. Do you have an actual source or just one of Hugh Hewitt's buddies blogging at 745am?

I can only assume this is part of the ACORN conspiracy to undermine the very fabric of democracy.

He's already got Maria Shriver. Beware the Austrian revolution, coming to a girlie-town near you!

Also, I second what the previous LW wrote. He's got the potential to be a great president, but let's start by acknowledging he's human. This cult of personality stuff scares me.

If its proven to be true, politics is a dirty business. I don't approve of it, just like I don't approve of Republican voter intimidation. Neither side's abuses justify the other side's, but hopefully they balance each other out in the end and we have a result that most rational Americans accept as fair. Unfortunately, the divisiveness of recent years (which I choose to blame primarily on the Bush administration, which is a separate point we could debate) has rendered a good portion of the population on both sides less than rational. Which is only natural, injustice (perceived or actual) elicits an emotional response. Posting stories like this, and refusing to acknowledge that there were deliberate efforts by Republicans in Ohio (2004) and Florida (2000) to affect the outcome of the election (and in Florida it did affect the outcome of the election - Gore won the vote in Florida, and should have therefore won the election, except for the Supreme Court's intervention) betrays "intellectual inauthenticity," for lack of a better phrase - the very thing you accuse the other side of in your letter.

And on a slightly personal note, the side that seems to make these rationalizations the most - they did it first, we gotta "work the dark side," is made up of the very same people who railed for years against a lack of truthfulness, against situational ethics, "moral relativism." It has been especially troublesome to me that the right-wing religious base, which I am intimately familiar with, has spawned an administration with such a low regard for the truth, and has made "moral relativism" official policy. I believe in moral absolutes, I try to live by them. I am voting Democrat, not because they are right about everything, but because at this point in time, they have the moral high ground.

ps - With regard to Scalia's carefully-reasoned legal position in support of his vote in Bush v. Gore ("that was forever ago, get over it"), I think Jon Stewart put it best when he said "Forever ago? He's still in office."

Anyways, I'll be checking in all day. Exciting times.

First off, I believe I predicted over 350 but under 400 electoral votes for Obama two days ago. Truly I am a brilliant and not at all arrogant young man for having done so.

Second, this is indeed good news. Getting one or two more members of the Scalito-Thomberts faction would have been an outright disaster. Regarding Kennedy, it appears the radicalism of the last eight years has pushed him left - supposedly he privately expressed some regret for his decision in Bush v. Gore, and he even reversed his vote on cert for Boumediene, and subsequently wrote the majority opinion.

Regarding Supreme Court jurisprudence, I am feeling good about my predictive powers right now and I am going to make a call - watch for some overwhelming intellectual dishonesty from Scalia specifically for the next four or eight years. His main argument in these detainee cases is that the Court should not intervene in executive decisions (especially in military matters, where the Court is presumably least competent) in wartime, because it should defer to the executive for the safety of the nation, etc. This was a major part of Rehnquest's jurisprudence (although I think he was at least honest about it and would have applied it evenly regardless of who was POTUS), I believe he wrote a book about it. Watch for Scalia to rather abruptly scale back his unitary executive theories and take a much more critical view of executive decisions. The guy is a disgrace, imo, and he gets away with it for two reasons: (1) he is pretty darn smart, and can argue with the best of them (2) people think he's a lot smarter than that - for some reason lawyers seem to think of him as a legal demigod. It is a bit obnoxious.

In bad new, it looks like Prop. 8 has passed in CA. That is distressing, but I am going to go ahead and predict that CA will overturn Prop. 8 in the next two decades. Young people are either for gay rights or not rabid enough to bother voting against it. It is a generational change that has not yet fully happened, but will.

And to finish off with some good news, Question 2 passed by a wide margin here in MA. Marijuana possession under 1 ounce has effectively been decriminalized. Nothing will change except that fewer lives will be ruined by prohibition and law enforcement resources will be put where they should be - catching violent criminals and drug importers. Eventually everyone will realize that the sky is not falling and we can get some work done on ending prohibion nationwide.