
While debris from collapsing financial institutions
continue to fall during the final days of the Bush Administration, the President has found something he considers a "success" — the Iraq war.
In an interview played on Japanese TV this week, a
"very pleased" Bush said: I think the decision to remove Saddam Hussein was right. .

Eureka Springs has become the San Francisco of Arkansas, according to the American Family Association. The AFA's latest DVD —
They're Coming to Your Town — teaches unsuspecting Christian communities how to prevent gays from taking over their towns. If you're so inclined, you can purchase the DVD in a five-pack and distribute it to your friends or Sunday school teachers.

This week the McCain ticket has tried to tenuously connect Barack Obama to Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, a leading scholar of Middle Eastern studies, who served on the University of Chicago faculty with Obama.
Sarah Palin
said yesterday: "This is important because his associate, Rashid Khalidi . .

In 2001 John McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts, part of which Barack Obama now wants to
let expire (while keeping some in place). In 2000, McCain shared a take on the progressive tax system, which deviates from the one he has now. He confronted a question from the daughter of "Joe the Doctor" who asked McCain at a 2000 townhall: "Why is it that someone like my father, who goes to school for 13 years, gets penalized in a huge tax bracket because he's a doctor?"

Sarah Palin has been
painting Barack Obama as unpatriotic lately, bringing up Obama's acquaintance with William Ayers, a
current college professor and former member of the Weather Underground, a radical organization that wanted to end the Vietnam War through acts of domestic terrorism when Obama was eight-years-old.
But the McCain/Palin ticket has dubious associations of its own. One example: Palin's connection to the separatist Alaskan Independence Party, founded by Joe Volgar who died buying explosives and said while alive: "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government."
Diddy's back with a new video blog, and though it's not as
long on nonsense as his last offering it's equally (and arguably) as short on substance. At least it's seasonally appropriate! Starring in his own horror movie, Diddy plays the clip of Katie and Sarah discussing newspapers, and Palin's reluctance to name a specific paper.

With the
Lunch Bucket vs.
Barracuda match up a hair over 24 hours away, the sassy, classy debate moderator Gwen Ifill has found her plate full of more than just prepping questions. Ifill, the PBS news maven and moderator of Washington Week,
broke her ankle on Monday, though her doctor has given her the A-OK to travel and keep her debate duties.

Still reeling from the effects of the cyclone this Spring,
rats and all, Myanmar's junta has
released 9,002 prisoners in a gesture they say is full of "loving kindness and goodwill," despite the fact that many doubt political prisoners will be in those numbers. One exception, Myanmar's longest serving political prisoner, Win Tin, who has been held since 1989. The 78-year-old spoke following his release from a friend's house
saying, "I have to continue with my unfinished task of trying to achieve democracy in Myanmar."

If you don't get all your news from David Letterman (who
lit into the subject last night), a new report by Oxfam International says not recycling or curbing your carbon footprint is effectively
violating the human rights of people living in the poorest nations. The report's author says, "Climate change was first seen as a scientific problem, then an economic one. Now it is becoming a matter of international justice."

Two false warnings issued by a local registrar of elections in Virginia may have
prevented students from registering to vote. The written warning, issued during an Obama-supporter voter registration drive at Virginia Tech, incorrectly cited dire consequences if students register on campus — namely, that parents could not claim the students as dependents and that the students would risk losing scholarships or health insurance coverage. The IRS released a statement explaining that there is no risk of losing dependent status, while the state board of elections said it will modify and clarify
murky guidelines.