Yes, Warlock #2 is out, and it's a doozy. I really like where this is going. More reviews of #2 here (warning: spoilers!). Go to your local comic store and pick it up! Get #1 too if you haven't already!

And, for those of you watching at home, you can get a pointy-headed intellectual's electoral prediction using, like, statistics and stuff. Current probability of a Kerry win: 58.286%.

Race played a role in at least five of the requests, according to Matt Robb, the Republican leader of the 48th ward in South Philadelphia. Robb said he allowed his name to be used because those polling places are in neighborhoods he doesn’t wish to visit.

"It’s predominantly, 100 percent black,” said Robb, who is white. “I’m just not going in there to get a knife in my back."

A bit further north and west, at Montgomery County Community College, some enterprising folks came up with a way to increase the number of registered Republican voters on campus: tell them they're actually signing a petition to legalize marijuana!:

Students, who last month signed a petition that was being circulated on the Blue Bell campus to legalize marijuana for primarily medicinal purposes, now are finding out that they are registered Republicans.
"This is just very disheartening," said Plymouth resident Jennifer Fugo, a 24-year-old continuing education student who describes herself as a "victim of voter registration manipulation."
"Everyone is encouraging young people to register and vote and then they experience something like this," Fugo said Monday. "This is just outrageous."

Update: Fair's fair, and I really should mention this man in Toledo who, instead of taking cash for registrations, accepted payment in crack. Election officials were tipped off when Dick Tracy, Mary Poppins, Michael Jordan and George Foreman registered as Democrats. (Really!)

How do I know?

Well, he's captured the highly influential novelist vote.

And, more importantly, the crucial Buffy demographic.

(Oh, yeah, and a bunch of foreign policy experts, too.)

Let's outline this. Bush said you lost your job because you're stupid. Then he said you're stupid because elementary and secondary schools failed you. Then he said he's going to help young people go to college. And, then he said we're going to send you to community college to learn some new things.

I'm all for providing funds to try to help retrain workers, but telling 50 year olds that they're supposed to go back to community college and start a new career shows what's wrong with this kind of thing. It's what's wrong with most welfare analysis of the effects of changing terms of trade on jobs.

Bush, I think, connected the best in the last (fuzzball) question about his wife. Laugh lines and all. I thought, how will Kerry up that one? I love my wife even more? Why, with his dead mother, that's how. Well, whatever works.

Some other linkage:

• Bush really did say that he wasn't that concerned about OBL. Thudfactor's got the tape.
• Keith Olbermann gives the debate to Kerry by a wide margin. But then, Olbermann was cranky.
• CNN does some fact checking.
• As of today, Bush is ahead in EC votes 284 to 228. Taking out the tossups, he's ahead 228 to 181. Anything can happen, folks.

And there's something very, well, modern about it as well. Morris wrote it in 1896, and while the language harkens back several centuries, the characters seem more complicated than I remember Malory's knights being. Morris hints at the internal life of Ralph of Upmeads and those around him, and they seem, well, human. Not only that: there's an ambiguity that I don't remember from Malory. Sometimes two good knights might fight each other by accident, while wearing the wrong armor or what have you, but it seemed always clear who was good and who was bad. (Admittedly, it's been a couple of decades [!] since I read Malory so I may not have picked up on things then.)

But when Ralph begins his wanderings, he's not sure quite what to do. He gets all sorts of conflicting advice, about which cities are good and which are bad, and what he should do to advance his fortune. He rescues a woman from a couple of knights, only to hear later that she's an evil witch. Yet he's fallen in love with her, and it's unclear for a long time if he's been duped by her or if the reports of her character are just political propaganda. (I won't ruin things by telling you which.)

I was struck by this passage in particular. Ralph and his friend Ursula approach a great volcanic plain they must cross on their quest, and Ursula says:

She put her hand upon the hand and said: "Three months ago I lay on my bed at Bourton Abbas, and all the while here was this huge manless waste lying under the bare heavens and threatened by the storehouse of the fires of the earth: and I had not seen it, nor thee either, O friend; and now it hath become a part of me for ever."

So if you're looking for a good fantasy read, don't mind some archaic language (did you know that "neat" also means "cattle"?), I'd recommend this. Heck you can even download it royalty-free!

I don't know if this is what it puports to be or not. There are a lot of ways this could have been assembled after the fact. But he does seem to scratch, wiggle, or adjust something in, on, or around his ear, right before the voice tells him who to call on.

Per an expert in Salon:

"There's no question about it. It's a pretty obvious one -- larger than most because it probably has descrambling capability," said Alex Darbut, technical and business development vice president for Resistance Technology in Arden Hills, Minn. Darbut examined photographs of the president's back taken from the Fox News video feed at the first presidential debate in Coral Gables, Fla., as well as 2002 photos of the president driving and working in a T-shirt on his Crawford ranch, which were posted on the White House Web site.

Update from ME-L:

Clearly, Bush is a secret adulterer!

The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.

Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.

Hardly airtight, right? A democratic dirty trick would be to accuse the RNC of trying to disenfranchise voters. However, there is some evidence beyond the accusations of these employees:

Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.

Hey Colin, keep an eye out:

We attempted to speak to Voters Outreach but found that its office has been rented out to someone else.

The landlord says Voters Outreach was evicted for non-payment of rent. Another source said the company has now moved on to Oregon where it is once again registering voters.

Nor is this the first such allegation, "Similar complaints have been received in Reno where the registrar has asked the FBI to investigate."

Thanks to Josh at TPM, who points out this same group gathered signatures for Nader in AZ, where he was bundled with a FAIR petition.

Given the rash of similar complaints (see the joint NAACP and People for the American Way report), and none levelled against the Dems, I have trouble understanding how some very intelligent people I know think both parties are the same.

"Roughly 80 percent of our cognitive power may be cranking away on tasks completely unknown to us. Curiously, this clandestine activity does not exist in the youngest brains, leading scientists to speculate that the mysterious goings-on that absorb the majority of our grey-matter are dedicated to subconsciously reprocessing our initial thoughts and experiences. The research, which may have profound implications for our very basis of understanding reality, appears in the journal Nature.

And one group of ferrets watch The Matrix, over and over and over again.

Whoah.

The findings themselves -- basically, that infant ferrets see the world entirely differently from adult ferrets, and that our (adult) brains are full of background processing even when we're not "perceiving" anything -- are pretty interesting, and we really need Alex to explain them for us. But you've got to love this guy's outlook:

"The basic findings are exciting enough, but you can't help but speculate on what they might mean in a deeper context," says Weliky. "It's one thing to say a ferret's understanding of reality is being reproduced inside his brain, but there's nothing to say that our understanding of the world is accurate. In a way, our neural structure imposes a certain structure on the outside world, and all we know is that at least one other mammalian brain seems to impose the same structure. Either that or The Matrix freaked out the ferrets the way it did everyone else."

Now TPM reports that Sinclair corporate relations veep Mark Hyman made the following comparison on CNN:

This is news. I can't change the fact that these people decided to come forward today. The networks had this opportunity over a month ago to speak with these people. They chose to suppress them. They chose to ignore them. They are acting like Holocaust deniers, pretending these men don't exist.

My Jewish grandparents were big supporters of the GOP. I wish I could ask them today what they make of all this.

Well, we can hope that the good folks at Operation Bubbe will put this to good use. (Thanks to LmdH for the tip on that.) They are organizing Get Out The Vote trips in Florida, where, as they note, "a slight increase in turnout among Jewish retirees could decide the election." Right now, according to the indispensible electoral-vote, Bush is leading Kerry by 4 points in Florida. It will take a lot of Bubbes and blacks to give Bush bupkis!

And the infinitely more powerful U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: "In an assessment of the civil rights record of the Bush administration, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a draft report that concludes the administration has failed to exhibit leadership or define a clear focus, relegating civil rights to a low priority."

I remember thinking, when I saw first the film as a kid, that he looked almost perfect in both roles, the nerd and the hero. I've come to like a harder edge in my comic book heroes, but obviously Reeve will always be one of the main icons of the Man of Steel for many of us. (I had a six-foot cardboard cutout of him that was completely awesome.)

Another cool thing he did: he told the story about the first few days after his accident. He was ready to die right then, couldn't imagine living like that. He wanted to let go. But he and his wife decided, together, to fight, as long and as hard as they had to. So he did. Faced down some pretty f*cked up kryptonite. I don't know if I could do that. He set quite an example.

So. Hats off to the man in the red cape.

May all beings be free of suffering and its causes.

The president says I've changed my mind. The first president in 72 years to lose jobs. Believed it in 1998 when Clinton was president. This president rushed to war, pushed our allies aside. This president hasn't listened. A president's job is to win the peace. Mr. President, countries are leaving the coalition, not joining. Ladies and gentlemen, it's his tax plan. This president chose a tax cut over homeland security. The president blocked it. Five million people have lost their health insurance under this president. Mr. President, you're batting 0 for 2. People's rights have been abused.

Our plan is working. We've already 75 percent of his people. I -- listen, I -- we've got a great country. People love America. Thanks. My opponent's right, we need good intelligence. Right, thank you for that. We've got to pay our troops more. You can save tax-free. Less regulations if we want jobs here; legal reform if we want jobs here; and we've got to keep taxes low. It was the right decision. On the tax cut, it's a big decision. I did the right decision. Charlie, thanks. Tomorrow, Afghanistan will be voting for a president.

I almost forgot two other debate highlights: When Bush actually forgot Kerry's name and called him "Kennedy". And Bush's claim that he had increased wetlands by "3 million." 3 million what? we wondered. Acres? Inches? "3 million wetlands," Debbie said. That must be it.

And finally, here's how Bush really felt after the debate: