I. Tennessee Senate — Harold Ford, Jr. (D) versus Bob Corker (R)

This ad is being attacked as racist, or making a subtle racist appeal. Maybe. That’s beside the point to the point I want to bring up. My question is simply this: They don’t look at pornography in Tennessee?

II. Pennsylvania Senate — Rick Santorum (R) versus Bob Casey, Jr.

“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.

“It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S.,” Santorum continued. “You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”

Unless he was fishing for making a stump speech at a sci-fi convention, I fail to understand why Rick Santorum would make this analogy.

III. Montana Senate — Conrad Burns (R) Bob Tester (D)

(the other video clips of this are 3 minutes long, so I’ll use this one.)

Nothing to say about it, except it is a good advertisement, and that Grant would have to be sued for political incompetence if he had failed to run an ad roughly like it.

V. Wyoming, House of Representatives At Large. Barbara Cubin (R). Gary Trauner (D). And, in this story’s case, the Libertarian figures, so… Thomas Rankin (Libertarian).

Thomas Rankin, a Libertarian candidate who has multiple sclerosis and uses an electric wheelchair, said that after the debate Sunday night, Cubin “walked over to me and said, ‘If you weren’t sitting in that chair, I’d slap you across the face.’”

“She is not the type of person Wyoming residents want representing them,” he said.

Okay. How about we pick on a man with Parkisan’s next time… Which brings us to Missouri, actually. But you can look that one up if you want — just type “Michael J Fox” and see what news that brings you.

John Kerry blames his 2004 presidential defeat on Usama Bin Laden’s Thursday – before – the – election video tape release. Bin Laden is quite media savvy: Thursday is the day you release news to surf through the longest possible news cycle wave; Friday is when you release news designed to be lost in the news cycle.

According to the end of — I believe Woodward’s new book but it may be a different one — CIA professionals came to the same conclusion, and the conclusion that Bin Laden was trying to get Bush re-elected, and mulled the meaning over the weekend. This meeting of the minds feeds into the perception of the neoconservatives (the Weekly Standard crowd) that the Intelligence services are filled with Clintonites who are undermining the Bush Administration. (Which was why Cheney had to circumvent them when they provided underwhelming reports of Saddam’s WMD stash.)

Maybe Kerry is correct. Though sans a Bin Laden video a Kerry victory would have to attributed to demagouging — of all things — a Flu Vaccine shortage. (Don’t remember that one, do you?)

It is plausible in my mind, as I contemplate the unseemly undermocratic underside of our nation’s history, that — yes indeed — Ohio was stolen — replete, as those that believe Ohio was stolen neglect to add to the conspiracy but it would be necessary for this to hold — with various safe states’ returns inflated to push Bush ahead in the popular vote as well as follow through with standard electoral trend-lines. It is possible that people who believe Ohio was stolen draw an overly-hopeful message from the accounts: the fallacy that an election fraud can only cover a certain percentage in the margins of an election. I suppose this is true to a small degree in extremities (though it has not always been the case in more overtly “I don’t care” historical examples): Kent Blackwell can not credibly win (or better to say “win”) his Ohio gubernatorial race — you can not jump from a 30 percent deficit in the polls to victory. But if you want to throw the Senate election to Mike Dewine from a slim deficit to a thin but substantial (say… 3 percentage points) victory and remain credible in the eyes of conventional punditocracy, it can be done. What will be said to be behind a “Mike Dewine victory?” Values voters, perhaps. A late ebbing of votes due to concerns on … National Security.

Which brings us back to that new ad. Not actually played in heavy rotation anywhere, but designed to be covered by the news media. Which fits its inspiration — Johnsons’ “These Are the Stakes” daisy ad equals the RNC’s “These are the stakes” Bin Laden ad. Johnson’s ad aired only once; this new ad aired in obscure slots on barely seen cable news networks.

The ad also suggests that Bush believes what Kerry believes: Bin Laden’s tape won him the election. But we already knew that: Bush changed the color scheme to orange at politically opportune times to stem any Kerry momentum. But with 2006, it shows a desperation and impatience. There is a greater than even chance Bin Laden will release a late Thursday before election video: the RNC feels the need to get one of those out now, so they have created their own. I guess we’ll see how this works out. If we have a democracy, that is.