Comments for 22 October

Marathon Running The woman who ran the fastest time at the San Francisco Marathon has been given first place prize money and declared “a winner”.

Math Humor

This “fail blog” post is funny and worth a look.

3-quarks daily has a funny poem about mathematicians in love

Personally, it is really more like this. Any lady that would wear such a shirt in public makes my heart flutter.

Today’s college students: obviously there is some danger in making over generalizations, but this article appears to be on the mark.

Science and the election: Cosmic Variance has a link to a site where scientists have posted videos explaining their choice in the 2008 U. S. Presidential election.

Local Politics

The IL-92 (State) House race has turned ugly: negativity abounds. Here are a couple of ads:

The US House race in IL-18 is getting interesting. Aaron Schock is the current favorite, but Senator Dick Durbin is now asking his supporters to send money to Callahan’s campaign.
Here is one of her ads.

Republican Hate and Bigotry
This is in response to a commenter about Republican hate.

First: there is a history of Republicans using race as a divisive issue; it is called the Southern Strategy.

A nice summary of what they are doing now can be found in Postsimian’s blog; is is quite a collection.

Second: they aren’t above using religion as well; they claim that our nation is a “Christian” nation.

For more of what passes as wingnut “thought”:

Third: Republicans have no problem with extreme ignorance in their ticket. Sarah Palin thinks that the “under God” phrase was in the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the nation. Never mind that the pledge is 20′th century invention (written by a socialist no less) and the “under God” phrase was added in the 1950s.

Note: the conservatives often bring up “flag burning” when talking about “liberal hate”; never mind that flag desecration is relatively rare.

So where does this get us today? Well, we are in a place where the Republicans absolutely have to get the bigot/hate vote; they are sunk without it. That is why when one of their campaign officials behaves nobly and runs off a hate spewing wingnut from one of their rallies, the campaign official is silenced rather than spotlighted as a fine example.

As a result, many think it is ok to make hateful and threatening calls to liberal groups (e. g., ACORN offices)

Local Republican 527s openly run racist ads.

Fortunately, there are those who refuse to make some of the more hateful commercials. (robocalls)

Stupid Republican Tricks

The Republicans have spent 150,000 thousand dollars on Sarah Palin’s clothing. So who is the elitist?

Of course Al Qaeda is now supporting the McCain campaign. Yes, the Republicans are crying “reverse psychology”, but when they announced support for John Kerry, they screamed a different tune. Note: Al Qaeda loves it when we are hated around the world; Obama might help change that.

John McCain: channels George W. Bush.

More of the same!

State of the race: fivethirtyeight.com and demconwatch.

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