It was either this or Yet Another Contrarian Electoral Essay. We figured you could use a break.

The Onion [via Sully]

TPM scores it a ban; we need to review the footage with the copy desk. Here’s the play from the Times:

Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves. The McCain-Palin presidential campaign says Ms. Palin never advocated censorship.

But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.

“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”

“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”

That would be Laura Chase, Palin’s “campaign manager” during her 1996 run for Wasilla mayor, when the town had less than 5,500 residents. “Bejeepers” is Alaskan for “holy shit that bitch is running wild.”

The McCain campaign responds in a related AP story that “Governor Sarah Palin has never asked anyone to ban a book, period.” Normally we’d parse that for nuance and spin, but since Geezer now favors the efficiency of repeated outrageous lies, we won’t bother.

Instead we’ll have a look at “Pastor I Am Gay“, the other book earning Palin’s Seal of Squeal. Written by Howard Bess, a “liberal Christian preacher” — we’ll pause while you reread that — from nearby Palmer, the book was on the shitlist of Palin’s church, the Wasilla Assembly of God. Bess says the rival church tried to force his book out of stores, and that librarian Mary Ellen Emmons (now Baker) told him several copies disappeared from the now-famous town library.

Must be a sale on scandals today. Buy Censorship, and we’ll throw in Homophobia for free!

Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes [NYT]

GOP campaign downplays Palin book-banning inquiry [AP]

“The McCain campaign said Gov. Palin opposed the bridge to nowhere, but now we know she supported it,” said Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor in a statement. “They said she didn’t seek earmarks, but now we know she hired a lobbyist to get millions in pork for her town and her state. They said she visited Iraq, but today we learned that she only stopped at the border. Americans are starting to wonder, is there anything the McCain campaign isn’t lying about?”

Palin never in Iraq, campaign now says [CNN]

If there’s one thing we do fear this fall, it’s not the increasingly whimsical attack ads, but the Rovian ground game. While we remain confident that 51 percent of the American electorate will come to their senses soon enough, we’re not at all confident they’ll actually be allowed to, y’know, vote.

Let’s start with a taste of Andrew Hacker’s article in the latest New York Review, which reminds us of the score to date:

Requiring a driver’s license to vote has a disparate racial impact, a finding that once commanded judicial notice. To apply for the state ID card that Indiana offers as an alternative, moreover, nondrivers must travel to a motor vehicles office, which for many would be a lengthy trip…

The Indiana decision [Crawford v. Marion County Election Board] will not only make it harder to add new people to the rolls; many who had previously voted without photo identification are now required to produce an official photograph. If Marion County (Indianapolis) has the same proportion of unlicensed voters as Milwaukee County, I count it as having more than 44,000 black residents who will be needing transport to motor bureaus to ensure that each item in their nondriver ID application has been properly filled in. Extended nationwide, this means that a lot of on-the-ground assistance is going to be needed.

And if that’s not enough to grab your attention, here’s the breaking news from Wisconsin: state attorney general J.B. Van Hollen has filed a lawsuit against the state’s election board, insisting that it crosscheck driver’s license registrations on voters who registered or changed address since January 1, 2006.

an election official said the lawsuit could force clerks to check data on about 1 million voters. And critics accused Van Hollen — a Republican serving as the state co-chair of John McCain’s presidential campaign — of filing the suit for partisan gain.

We won’t even bother listing suspicions about The Company Formerly Known As Diebold, or the integrity of its equipment in the best of circumstances. It’s enough to note that concerted efforts to Block the Vote are already underway, in states where denying the franchise to significantly large numbers of American citizens would be beneficial to a campaign too desperate to lose.

In other words: It’s the Ballots, stupid.

Obama: The Price of Being Black [NY Review]

Van Hollen’s voter-check lawsuit sets off a tempest [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

On one hand, we’re just a tad uncomfortable running this as the Porn Post.

On the other hand — we can’t resist.

But it’s a sad story. David W. Johnson’s wife suffered a stroke some years back, and she was placed in a Portage, Wisconsin, nursing home. Although she was all but comatose, he remained a devoted husband, visiting daily, reading her the Bible, moving her limbs so her muscles wouldn’t atrophy.

Oh, and closing the door to her room and, er…

Yeah. That.

But that’s not the story. The staff grew suspicious that he was too loving a husband, and tipped off the cops. The cops got a search warrant, installed a hidden camera in the room, and…

There you go. Caught on tape. That’s the weird part.

The wife’s sister is cool with loving hubby, so we’re not going to pull a Frist and diagnose his behavior from afar. But the tape was used to bring charges against hubby, the tape was thrown out of court as the product of an illegal search, and the tape was the basis of an unsuccessful appeal by prosecutors to a state appeals court.

And the tape may yet travel to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Not that anybody’s watching it, of course. Are they?

Wis. court: Cops illegally taped nursing home sex [AP]

Nojo, 7 a.m.: “Kindie Porn already established that John McCain was willing to lose his integrity to win an election.”

TPM, 3:04 p.m.: “An Obama spokesperson just blasted out a statement comparing McCain’s current campaign to the infamously despicable 2000 campaign run against him in South Carolina — true fighting words — and adding that McCain ‘would rather lose his integrity than lose an election.'”

(Update: And in the Low-Hanging Fruit aisle, you can see variations on the theme starting to show up in late July. But hey, it’s all about timing.)

One of the tricks to surviving the next couple of months is to not pay attention.

And by that we mean: Don’t twitch like a goddam exposed nerve at every development.

To put it politely.

We sat out Lipstickgate, for example, because Kindie Porn already established that John McCain was willing to lose his integrity to win an election. No point tossing our soda over subsequent installments. (Unless they’re really good, of course. But Kindie Porn sets a high standard in low politics.)

It’s a matter of finding the signal in the noise, the leading indicators of where things are going. Some days there’s so much static, you might as well be listening to Al Smith battle Herbert Hoover on the wireless. Other days you might notice that Geezer doesn’t draw adoring crowds without Talibunny to display like a motocross queen, and file that for future reference. Three strikes is a trend.

What you don’t do is worry about the latest poll revealing that Demographic A supports Candidate B because of Issue C. Demographics don’t vote. States do. (The exception: Throughout the spring, folks under 50 were very likely to be Obama voters. The vote was split by generation, not gender. We’re keeping an eye on that.)

You also write off what cannot be changed, and see what remains. You know Charlie Gibson is going to be lobbing snowballs, so move on to something else — unless Talibunny fields them with a blowtorch. You know the media’s going to roll over and play dead (exceptions always welcome), so start considering whether anyone outside the chattersphere is paying attention.

We remain confident, but the election was never a given. The disconnect between John McCain’s reputation and John McCain’s actions — “I’m John McCain, and I approved this latest abomination of a commercial” — has yet to settle in. But it’s being noted, and not just by Obama partisans. We know what an electoral tipping point feels like (“There you go again!”), and we haven’t felt it yet.

The moment we do, we’ll order that steerage ticket for the Ark.