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?

Our Open Thread/Dance-Off for the Obamamercial kicks its heels at 7:45 p.m. Eastern. NBC, CBS and Fox are carrying it, as is MSNBC — which we think means West Coast cable potatoes will be able to catch the early feed. Or you can watch John McCain’s counterprogramming on ABC: “Pushing Daisies”.

Obama starring in infomercial, broader TV blitz [AP]

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.

The Talibunny has forsaken him.  The Psychogeezer says he should resign. The head of the NRSC calls his conviction a “disgrace“. Even Mitch “My Old Kentucky Homo” McConnell has had enough.  But the Hulk vows to smash everything in his bid for another Senate term:

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) is returning to Alaska tomorrow to resume his re-election campaign, “despite being convicted of felonies that carry the potential of years in prison.” “It’s not over yet!” Stevens said yesterday. “You’ve got that right,” said his wife, Catherine Stevens.

And the best part?  Ted can’t even vote for himself. 

That’s a voter purge we can be proud of, my friends.

An update from The General after the jump:

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We’re violating our self-imposed prohibition on headline cursing because we couldn’t forgive ourselves if we let the opportunity slip by. And for our transgression you may blame our Oz correspondent CheapBoy, who inadvertently led us to the Story of the Century.

It begins with a visit by the Whyte family of Sydney to the posh Coogee Bay Hotel, “where every day’s a great day at the bay.” The Whytes were there to watch Grand Final Day, the culminating event of Australian Rules Football, which Wikipedia informs us involves “a ball in the shape of a prolate spheroid” — an apt description of what was to befall them.

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As everybody knows by now: Tubes is going down.  Guilty, across the board. 

Open thread for your schadefruede-induced expressions of AWESOME.

LATE UPDATE: Jesus. You knew this was coming but, per AP: The ATF says it has broken up a plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 102 black people in a Tennessee murder spree. In court records unsealed Monday, agents said they disrupted plans to rob a gun store and target an unnamed but predominantly African-American high school by two neo-Nazi skinheads.

So open-thread on these nutcases as well, if you’d like — though there is probably very little to say about these idiots that could be printed in a family blog like this one.

graphic: The General