A. “Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking snakehandlers in my motherfucking government!”

B. “No on Prop 8. The very worst there is. When you absolutely, positively got to piss off every motherfucking sensible person in the room… accept no substitutes.”

C. “DO YOU ACT… LIKE… A BITCH?!” [Screamed denial.] “Then why did you try to vote like a bitch?” [Interrupting mumbled retort.] “Yes you did! YES! YOU! DID!”

Confession time, folks. I’m reaching a critical mass of SUCK on the news.

It seems like there is news that moves things one way or the other every damn hour, and it has me a little punch-drunk at the moment. By the time Tuesday night rolls around, I might just be reduced to involuntary, myoclonic twitching. And I don’t think I’m alone here, frankly.

I need to decompress folks. Seriously. Talk me down. (And, I suspect: help talk fellow travellers down too.)

OK, everybody: al-Qaeda is in. Final chapter of Election 2008 begins…. now:

An al Qaeda leader has called for President George W. Bush and the Republicans to be “humiliated”, without endorsing any party in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, according to a video posted on the Internet.

“O God, humiliate Bush and his party, O Lord of the Worlds, degrade and defy him,” Abu Yahya al-Libi said at the end of sermon marking the Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr, in a video posted on the Internet.

Libi, one of the top al Qaeda commanders believed to be living in Afghanistan or Pakistan, called for God’s wrath to be brought against Bush equating him with past tyrants in history.

Geezer? Barry? This one’s for the game.

(This comes at precisely the right time for the old man. Seriously: there was some off-the-charts bullshit from Geezer today about how Barack Obama supports tax breaks for oil companies. And he gets a free pass, because al-Qaeda wants to pull votes away from Black Eagle.)

Hopey had better come strong here, before Geezer drives the narrative. They’ve got about 12 hours before the blast-ad drops. Barry: hurry up, but don’t rush.

The last bits of economic data before the election just came out.  And… it’s a recession.  (You knew this, but the Commerce Department just fessed up.) 

3rd Quarter GDP: 0.3% FAIL.  Initial jobless claims this week?  Well, there are 479,000 new socialists out there.  (Welcome!  Coffee and danish out in the hall if you want some — help yourself.)  Oh: and Exxon Mobil beat expectations on its earnings this morning and had a record-breaking quarter.  (This is a recording.) 

Hopey can spin all three numbers today.  Geezer and Tailbunny have to find a radical professor at Northwestern to harp on (UIC and U of C are tapped out for that at this point) — don’t you worry… National Review is on the case as we speak.

And there it is.  Only two things can save the old man now: something that allows Geezer to spin terrorism (Osama or Mahmoud popping off, the military killing al-Qaeda’s number two for the sixteenth time, etc.), or a massively effective vote suppression effort (which has been a big pile of nope thus far, the efforts of GOPers notwithstanding).  Both still could happen.  But: my cautious optimism meter is ticking upwards, slightly.

Sometimes there are flashes of decency over at the National Review. Rarely, but it happens. This is not one of those times:

Try as I might, I cannot really understand how even a minimum standard of voting security can be maintained when, as an Ohio judge did yesterday, you decide to let the homeless vote. If there is no address — how do you check whether someone has voted before or whether they are using a real name? I get that the judge is attempting to enable fraud on behalf of his campaign — but how does this pass even a minimum test of reasonableness?

Obviously. Jesus Himself would haul the homeless into Court and get a permanent injunction against their right to vote. You see, He was a hardass about stuff like that.

Oy.

Item: Liddy Dole has brought an ad insinuating that her Senate challenger, Kay Hagen, is a closet atheist.

Nothing has been decided yet, of course. But, good Lord, they are grasping at straws like mad, aren’t they?

Item: Charlie Crist extends early voting hours, so that polls will be open 12 hours per day for the duration, as opposed to 8.  (Weekend counts as one day apparently, so 12 hours total over two days.)

The wingers are having a field day with this, of course (e.g. Crist = ACORN = Commie). My personal favorite is short and to the point:

Early voting is bad and by Crist doing this he just gave the election to Obama. I am shocked and disgusted.

(Possibility of this actually coming from a Democrat… acknowledged. Sockpuppetry is all the rage you know. But it probably did come from a Republican, an unidentified source tells me. Thus: true. Wingnuts are so adorable when they’re crazy.)

Note: we do not discount the whole black box thing where the black box thing was born. Yet, props where props be due, until proven otherwise.