Bob Shamansky is a great candidate running for Congress in OH-12 against Pat Tiberi. There may only be a week remaining, but it is not too late for you to help out.

Furthermore, there is a reason for just about every motivational style you might have, listed below the fold. Up here, I'll start with the newest - Hope & Excitement: The much discussed Majority Watch polls that were released today include the very first independent poll in the OH-12 race. Although most major forecasters have only recently moved this race from Safe/Solid Republican to Likely Republican (and some have not yet made that leap), the first polling released to the public shows a six point spread, with a Margin-of-Error of +- 3.1. The MOE of a spread (at least when both candidates have significant support) is double the MOE reported, which refers to a candidates percentage (e.g. in this case Bob is polling at 46%, +- 3.1%) Thus the 6 point spread in the poll is within the MOE.

One week out and we are in a statistical dead heat. We can do this.

I've been a little lazy, and I hadn't gotten around to changing my voter registration to my new home in Bexley, OH, a suburb of Columbus. I've had the new registration filled out and I'd been waiting for my next trip to the library with my daughter to drop it off, but sometimes life goes by kinda quick. So it got to be October and I didn't want to take any chances with a delay between now and the 10th (deadline for changes), so I decided to go the Board Of Elections and do it right there in person. When I found out that today was going to be the first day of early in-person voting, I decided to wait and try and kill two birds with one stone.

Long, highly detailed story of getting the wrong ballot below the flip

Southwest Ohio media has been picking up a story of plagiarism by everyone's favorite right-wing wacko Jean Scmidt. She recently sent an op-ed out to newspapers in her district that was nearly identical to an op-ed that Deborah Pryce, another endangered Republican CongressCritter from Ohio had distributed in July. Schmidt's defense? Everyone signs their names to the work of others.  

Some have been hitting her hard for that defense, but she's right. And we should let everyone know that Deborah Pryce is not the victim, she's a perpetrator. So is Sam Graves.

This was diaried earlier, but I think folks have been missing a larger point.

They haven't perpetrated theft. They've rented their mouths out."

I couldn't dream this up if I tried. According to CattleNetwork.Com, my soon-to-be-former House Rep is the latest person to have signed on as a co-sponsor of H.R. 4341. What is H.R. 4341? It's an amendment to the Superfund Environmental Cleanup legislation, specifically, an amendment that excludes manure from being considered a pollutant.

There's a classic scene in the Princess Bride wherein a character talks through the problem of deducing which cup his rival has poisoned and wishes him to drink from.

In 2004, The Guardian invited its British readers to send mail encouraging a vote for Kerry to undeclared voters in Clark  County, Ohio. The plan may very well have influenced the vote. Against Kerry, and in favor of Bush.

It's 2006. Just to the east of Clark Co., in OH-12, Pat Tiberi is desperately trying to hold on to his "safe" seat.

So what to do with these recent developments?

One thing that really gets me is when Republicans use the words of popular liberal ideas to mislead people into supporting unpopular corporate agendas. Walk with me:

I recently switched my major insurance policies over to Nationwide. As I said to my wife, it may seem bizarre to think of a huge corporation as a local business, but I feel like more of my premium will end up being spent in central Ohio than was the case with our last provider. Anyway, Nationwide gives you a discount if you join the Farm Bureau. Given that the discount is more than the membership fee, we signed on. Yesterday, we got our first issue of the Farm Bureau magazine called 'Our Ohio.' I haven't read most of it. I read the first page and got so mad I fumed about it the entire time I was mowing our lawn (with the electric mower).

The editorial is entitled America's true power shortage, referring to author John C. ("Jack") Fisher's contention that what America truly lacks is "political will." And he's right about that. But so so wrong about other things...

Ohio's twelfth district is almost unanimously considered "Safe Republican." Bob Shamansky, the Democratic challenger isn't acting as if he thinks so. He's just upped his own personal funding total to one million dollars. The Republican who holds that seat doesn't seem to think so. Pat Tiberi, referred to by some as 'Pac Man' Tiberi, by others (okay, me) as Pa(rro)t Tiberi, is making headlines in Columbus by running away from Bush. Below the fold I'll give you some reasons to keep your eyes on this race.

Word has leaked from Connecticut officials that the newly formed 'Connecticut for Lieberman Party,' widely viewed as a vehicle for Joe Lieberman to thrust himself into the 2006 CT Senate general election, has filed a petition to rename itself 'America for Lieberman,' and field a national slate of candidate(s).

Jeannette Walls does a gossip column for MSNBC called 'Jeannette Walls Delivers the Scoop.' The lead item in the linked column has to do with K-Fed's opinion of Britney's hiring of a male nanny...

I have no idea why I read the article in the first place, but if you read it to the end you'll find an item on Janeane Garafolo and Sam Seder having a spat on the set of the Majority Report.

I don't know anything about the alleged spat. I don't really care. Gossip, even celebrity gossip, is kind of ugly.

What I do know is that names like Sam Seder and The Majority Report are appearing in CELEBRITY gossip columns. They are implicitly given cultural icon status, with the assumption that they should be of interest to the pop-culturally literate.

Pardon me if it seems strange, but I'm going to celebrate what looks like one big step for the Left Wing Noise Machine.

Reuters has a story that is really about a piece of meta-research, with a somewhat more compeling hook:

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Teenagers who take pledges to remain virgins until marriage are likely to deny having taken the pledge if they later become sexually active. Conversely, those who were sexual active before taking the pledge frequency deny their sexual history, according to new study findings.

...

According to Rosenbaum, "it's not possible to know why pledgers retracted their sexual history since it's impossible to know whether respondents actually had sex."

"Psychology studies in a variety of contexts seem to demonstrate that people's memories of their behavior are consistent with their beliefs rather than their actual behavior," she told Reuters Health, adding that "anecdotally, some people seem to feel like the answer which is strictly true may not represent themselves accurately."

You may think I'm about to launch into an attack on the folly of Abstinence-Only Education. Nope. The problem is much, much worse.

Allow me to lead with my conclusion: Our current government is collecting information at unprecedented levels. At the same time, they are weakening the value of our own information, preventing us from creating new knowledge, and providing disincentives to increasing our own knowledge.

The short story I'm using as a launching point is not overly dramatic, and is easy to write off as being about one individual. The event, however, disturbed me quite a bit at the time, and just keeps getting worse.

I figure that in amongst the pile-up of ribbons on some of these vehicles, a few more might go un-noticed, and their presence could spark some much-needed dialogue.

Of Course, There's More...

There have been a number of diaries lately, most notably Hunter's, that have pointed out that Conservative ideologues  can no longer pin the failures of Conservative thought on the inadequacy of Conservative practice.

Fine. We have seen what Conservatism is. But what is a Conservative? It seems insufficient to just pin a laundry list of generic failures on an individual, or to define them by what they are not, so...

I'll offer a definition that bridges Conservatism with Conservatives:

A Conservative is a person who disdains Government but is enraptured with Politics.

Let me hear yours.

Sometimes, I hear Right-Wing voices talking about the views and desires of the "Move-On" wing of the
Democratic Party, or the "Left Wing Extremists on blogs like The Daily Kos..."

We all know that Kos thinks of this project as partisan rather than ideological, and we all know that
evidence is valued above sheer volume here, unlike the insides of some noise machines we might name.

Kos has repeatedly said that he has/does/will cut slack to red/purple state politicians on positions
that don't correspond to issues that are seriously in play. That's his perogative, and it is
consistent with the views of many here that politics is a game of pragmatics and what matters is
getting results. That's an honest opinion, and plenty of evidence can be marshalled in its defense.

But to think that volume, ideological purism, and even shrillness don't get results is wrong. They get
positive results. Just not the ones the voices are demanding. And thus, I think our reasoned approach
provides a disservice to our partisan intentions at times...

Which of these scenarios is better for the red-district democrat:

This Year:

And we are on the offensive in Iraq, with a clear plan for victory. First, we are helping Iraqis build an inclusive government, so that old resentments will be eased, and the insurgency marginalized...

Worried about your job going overseas with the passage of a new trade agreement?
Worried that you could work for a lifetime and end up poor?
Worried about dependence on foreign oil?
Worried about the income tax burden shifting to the middle class?
Worried about trade deficits? The corporate media? The environment?
Worried that our leader shudders at the notion of hard work?

That's because you don't get it. Jobs are for suckers and income is a crutch.

Last summer, I passed a woman stranded on the side of the freeway in the middle of nowhere, Indiana. Like everyone else, I turned and looked at her for a second, then went on by at 75mph. After I looked at her, though, it didn't seem like she had a cell phone or a clue as to what she should do. 15 miles later, at the next exit (I told you it was the middle of nowhere), I turned around to see if she was still there. Half an hour after I had first seen her, there she was, now just sitting by her pickup truck. So I turned around at the next exit in the opposite direction, and 15 minutes later I came upon a green truck covered with W04/Support Our Troops/Jesusfish stickers. I pulled over, got out of my car, and asked her if there was anything I could do to help. She was quite grateful and allowed me to drive her to a payphone in the next town.

For the fun part, follow me over the flip...

On page 2 of today's Chicago Sun Times, Columnist Debra Pickett takes advantage of the prominent placement to rip into Bush's style of dealing with the press, the ironies it brought up during Karzai's visit, and the unseamliness of the attacks on Voinovich with a column called Freedom's Just Another Word for Dodging Tough Questions.

The final grafs:

set-up below the fold.