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.

Okay, the state polls are starting to catch up with events, so let’s have a look at the field.

The chart above is the one we’re watching most closely — it shows the electoral-vote count in states where either candidate leads by more than 5 percent. (We’re treating everything else as a statistical dead heat.) State polls aren’t released as frequently as national dailies, and this chart averages polling over the past seven days, so there’s gonna be some lag in the results.

And if you want to say that Obama drove off a cliff after the Republican convention — wait a sec.

Certainly more states are in play at the moment, which shouldn’t be unexpected. We’ll need another week, after the hysteria dies down, to see whether that’s a blip or a fact.

But what catches our attention — provisionally, it’s still early — is that McCain hasn’t made any significant gain. You’d expect the lines to cross right about now, and granted, they still might. But so far, the takeaway is that while voters aren’t certain about Obama, they don’t seem to have much stomach for the alternative.

For comparison, let’s look at 2004:

So much bobbing and weaving there, it might as well be a toss-up — nothing approaching the clarity of this year’s pattern.

And that’s one reason why we’re not freaking out yet — it’s just too soon to hit the eject button, and nothing’s yet outside our comfort zone. Circumstances may change in another week, but the only bump we’re seeing so far is a speed bump for Barry.

Electoral College Graphs 2008 [Electoral-Vote.com]

Live from Wasilla [Band of Thebes, via Sully]

Back in our distant childhood, Joe McCarthy was even more distant, someone you would see, if at all, in a scratchy kinescope clip. He was as quaint as a war movie, as irrelevant as the Andrews Sisters.

We knew about “McCarthyism” long before we knew about McCarthy. The word, if not the man, was relevant in the political climate of our youth. It was used with derision. It was something to avoid. It was the L Word of its day.

Joe came to mind as we were contemplating Barry’s response to McCain’s Rovian attack ads. It seems a tepid response at first, not at all what’s required. It’s not angry.

I don’t care what they say about me, but I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage and swift-boat politics. Enough is enough.

Well, fine, we were thinking, but civility doesn’t win elections. Get out the rhetorical bat, whack some rhetorical kneecaps. Politics is bloodsport, violence punctuated by consultant meetings. Man up.

But then we remembered the line that finally broke Bomber Joe’s winning streak:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness… You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

And just like that — in that very moment — it was over. Joseph Welch slayed the dragon.

It’s a risky strategy in the hothouse timeframe of a fall presidential campaign, but hey, it’s risky running as a black man in These United States. We want to see more, we want to see it expressed with more conviction. But the more egregious McCain’s attacks get — and they will, Rovians can’t help themselves — the more righteous civility just might carry the day.

Obama On Lipstick Controversy: Attacks Media, Says “Enough Is Enough” [TPM]

Yes, McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country’s safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country’s national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time.

McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States.

Nobody’s listening to him either, but it’s fun to watch him stew.

McCain’s Integrity [Atlantic]