In a major shift in policy today, Barack Obama, who has vowed all election season to have a salad instead ordered a large bowl of lettuce along with tomato slices, cucumbers, carrot shavings, a hard boiled egg, with cut up pieces of ham, salami and cheese.

The Republican party, understandably jumped on this shocking change in strategy:

THIS ELECTION IS GOING TO BE A BARN BURNER SO DON'T YOU TURN OFF CNN AND CNBC AND MSNBC BECAUSE IF YOU DO YOU'LL BE REALLY, REALLY SORRY AND YOU'LL BE THE LAST TO KNOW SOMETHING YOU WISH YOU WERE THE FIRST TO KNOW!

SERIOUSLY THIS ELECTION IS ESSENTIALLY TIED AND IF YOU TURN OFF THAT TELEVISION YOU MAY DIE OF "NOT KNOWING SOMETHING" DISEASE WHICH IS VERY PAINFUL AND TOTALLY EMBARRASSING... WORSE EVEN THAN THAT TIME IN HIGH SCHOOL WHEN YOU WENT OUT FOR GYM WITHOUT PUTTING YOUR SHORTS ON.

…is the title of this"blog" promoted to the front page a few days ago by the Deep Thinkers™ at RedState.com.

Now, normally I try to ignore this merry band of irrelevant political self-satisfiers with the cognitive abilities and readership the size of a family of decapitated squirrels, BUT when they choose to endorse a chin-high pile of intellectual manure… well… lets take a look:

Her name is Elaine May and she's fantastic.

Reds. Tootsie. Heaven Can Wait.

Really, really smart. Unbelievably witty.

I'd sell my writers soul to be her for a week.

And all her qualifications, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, and 34 million dollars couldn't save it from being a disaster one thousand times worse then your 3rd grade school photos.

(The one with the "butt-cut" and the wide collared shirt.)

Which is why the Clark dust-up is both irrelevant and a trap.

CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. (June 26) - A millionaire who inflicted years of abuse on two Indonesian housekeepers held as virtual slaves in her Long Island mansion was sentenced Thursday. The victims testified that they were beaten with brooms and umbrellas, slashed with knives, and forced to climb stairs and take freezing showers as punishment. One victim was forced to eat chili peppers against her will, then was forced to eat her own vomit when she couldn't keep the peppers down, prosecutors said.

Ralph Nader on Barack Obama:

"There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American," Nader told the paper.

"Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that?"

"Is it because he wants to talk white?"

Worth a cool 15-20 milly and yet you're still maxed on the plastic?

McCains report more than $100,000 in credit card debt

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his wife reported more than $100,000 of credit card liabilities, according to financial disclosure documents released Friday.

The presidential candidate and his wife Cindy reported piling up debt on a charge card between $10,000 and $15,000. His wife’s solo charge card has between $100,000 and $250,000 in debt to American Express.

McCain's wife also has a second American Express charge card listed on the senator's financial disclosure that was carrying $100,000 to $250,000 in debt.

Another charge card with American Express, this one for a “dependent child,” is carrying debt in the range of $15,000 and $50,000.

...to spot Jeffrey Lieber at next months Netroots Nation...

Bill Kristol on Fox News Sunday (this weekend) speaking of Obama:

"Its just factually true that electing someone with the policies he’s articulated, I think, increases the risk of enemies testing him in his first months in office and allies being worried that he’s too weak...”

Republican Solution Point #104

PROBLEM: The Iraq War, falsely billed as being about Weapons of Mass Destruction, has gone on years longer than predicted, cost billions more than expected, and claimed the lives of thousands of young Americans.

REPUBSOLUTION!: Corporate tax cuts, targeted toward the invention of a glorious time machine so that we can make up BETTER reasons for going to war with Iraq.

You can only see two of the wheels, but trust me there are four.

Also we got a windshield and a grill.

Some lights.

That door on the side is how you get inside.

Walk up the steps and you'll find a driver's seat and a steering device (similar to the one in your car).

Take a long good look because being able to identify a bus is the first step to being able to tell whether or not you've been... well... another picture is in order:

Sorry about your privacy, which I took when I listened in on your phone calls, but as the Attorney General stipulated, at the behest of the President, I was hunting terrorists, so... it must've been really awful when your brother drank himself to death.

You know you may need to take a two month break from polling results...

...if only you ask her to say them:

Ol' Cindy's sage advice about the very nature of life:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.

Realizing their candidate is essentially irrelevant to this year's election and knowing the only way John McCain can win the Presidency would be for Republicans to destroy Democrat Barack Obama, the RNC released the following annotated electoral map in order to persuade nervous contributers that they do have a path to win the White House:

This is the worst kind of meta. It's meta without recourse.

So, If you read further, consider checking MetaJesus with the guy behind the counter.

I promise he'll hand you a number and return it when you leave.

Now, with that out of the way...

Though my understanding of biology is basic, I know definitively that at one time you had a mother and a father, which makes you someone's son or daughter and that fact alone should give you the perspective to be able to figure out that the person who passed away in the last twenty four hours... the person you've chosen TODAY to air you grievances about... the person whose faults and foibles you MUST bring to light AND IMMEDIATELY... ALSO has or had a mother and a father and quite possibly a wife and maybe even sons and daughters all of whom are, as you sit at your computer hoping to receive tips and recommendations, likely staring at a wall, their subconscious minds awash with all the days forward that will be without their son or daughter or father or brother or husband.

And as they rise slowly, telling themselves to just keep breathing, the unbelievable, unfathomable, awful details of things like funerals and open caskets and life insurance policies and WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED rushing past their regrets of things unsaid and opportunities missed and neverevermores... let me say to you what they would, if their hearts had not just been ripped from their chests:

"Couldn't you have waited. Just a little?"

And then let me add my own two words of observation...

Hold that thought.

I'm going to repurpose something... and get to Netroots Nation via the literary curveball.

*****

So, its December 1997, two days after I’d met the woman who would eventually become my wife, and six months after I’d been laid-off from my last job, and I’m pacing my weirdly 70’s loft apartment staring at the telephone.

It has to ring. It just HAS to.

Because, if the phone rings, I get my first REAL, paying job as a Hollywood writer.

If not, well... that's how this becomes another Jeffrey Lieber dildo story.