Daughter of Illinois Sen. Durbin dies at 40 — chicagotribune.com Very sad news. My condolences to the Durbin family. What a terrible sorrow for them.
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Earlier today/late last night, the news broke that Obama’s Kenyan aunt is living in this country illegally, having overstayed her visa after her request for asylum was denied. Talking Points Memo ruminates on the timing (suspiciously close to the election) and the source (suspiciously originating on a Rupert Murdoch-owned publication, then getting echo-chambered). TPMMuckraker | Talking Points Memo | The Anatomy of a Smear On the record, of course, the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, is telling reporters it can’t comment on any individual person’s immigration status. It would appear to be a…
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Daily Kos: Palin Pranked Listen to the hilarious call here. EPIC FAIL. Grandpa McCain isn’t going to be happy about this one. Their website must be getting slammed because it isn’t loading for some. Here is the YouTube [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/QbEwKcs-7Hc" width="425" height="344" wmode="transparent" /] (h/t NegSpin): Oh my God!! This is indeed EPIC… at first Palin is falling all over herself thanking him for taking a few minutes to call her, and he drops names of well-known Canadian entertainers, catching her out on not knowing the names of the real French and Canadian dignitaries they “replaced.” Throughout the conversation, Audette…
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A couple flew home to New York all the way from Bangalore in order to vote after their absentee ballots failed to arrive in time. They are both naturalized citizens. Some people really value their right to vote – and based on what I know of the fares from India to New York via Chicago, they probably paid full-coach, no discount. I hope they at least got a mileage upgrade, that Delhi-Chicago flight on American is pretty brutal according to some of my clients. Just changing planes as in-transit travelers is an ordeal. I admire this couple for their tenacity,…
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Lincoln Mitchell: Rethinking the American Electorate after an Obama Victory After properly invoking a great American philosopher, Lawrence Berra by noting “it ain’t over ’til it’s over,” HuffPost’s Lincoln Mitchell points out that an Obama victory will force all of us, right and left, to rethink our positions. I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now, ever since running across this thoughtful rumination comparing political divides to religious ones. There will be no place for polarized politics in the future; it’s a failed model that merely perpetuates itself with constant discord and conflict. We don’t have time for…
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This morning we ran some errands, went back to the house to retrieve my forgotten ID, and then we went to the village hall to vote. When we got there, we were waved over to a small table and given early-voting applications to fill in and sign – fortunately, I had thought to retrieve my actual voter’s registration card, which had stuff on it we needed, like our precinct number. Otherwise, they would have looked it up. We were advised about the constitutional convention kerfuffle, and were given a sheet explaining what the ballot initiative was, how by law it’s…
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Editor & Publisher is keeping track of newspaper endorsements of Obama and McCain; they’re also noting which papers were for Kerry and which were for Bush last time around. TUESDAY: Updated Endorsement Tally — Obama Leads 121-42
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There’s a third “major paper” in the Chicago area, the Daily Herald. They’re not quite as famous as the Chicago Tribune or the Sun-Times, being known more as a suburban paper with a raft of very small community papers (some of the “shopper paper and local high school sports” variety). It’s more conservative than the Trib and makes no bones about it; having dealt with them trying to get publicity inserted for my Episcopal parish, I can tell you they’re really into faith news. They probably are more interested in items of interest to Catholics and maybe conservative Protestants, though.…
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What’s New in ScribeFire 3.1.3? – ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging The following changes were made to ScribeFire between versions 3.1.2 and 3.1.3: Bug Fixes Fixed bug causing some users to see “Could not set up API Object for Blog type” error Yeah, this post using Scribefire is probably still going to get the angle brackets stripped by WordPress: this started happening with the latest version of WP and no fix in sight yet. It’s a PHP bug, and not easily fixable according to David. UPDATE: Yep, it failed. I don’t know if WP 2.7 will fix this or not.
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I have a TERRIBLE memory, but sometimes I get a flash of insight. Does the name Nathan Sproul mean anything to you? I got one of those flashes, and found this Daily Kos: State of the Nation post that I actually remembered reading in 2004.