Odd News and a new play: watch the preparatory video for Strauss at Midnight by Huffington Post blogger Jeff Dorchen.

CNBC financial reporter Rick Santelli famously yells out among the stock traders, "How many of you want to pay your neighbor's mortgage?" This because instead of giving all the money in the federal budget to the people who sold un-payable mortgages or insured them, Obama wants a portion of the...

Mazel tov USA!

Okay, we elected him, now what do we do with him?

Let's not worry about that for a while. Let's just enjoy for now the knowledge that our democratic republic actually can and did operate an election according to its ideals...

The offending gentleman, a Mr. Goetsch, regrets his actions, although he and wife tell a different story from Nancy Takehara's. He claims to have asked Takehara to leave several times before escorting her away by the scruff of the neck.

Police said the incident remains under investigation and a...

Nancy Takehara, the Chicagoan who was assaulted while canvassing for Obama in Caledonia, Wisconsin, was contacted by the candidate himself on the day of the incident. By the time Takehara had returned home, there was an answering machine message from the campaign. She called the number and Obama spoke to...

A woman canvassing for Obama in Wisconsin was punched in the face by a man ranting about ACORN. The woman was part of a canvassing effort organized by friends of mine. As we were about to go on stage for Oobleck Election Play 2008: The Trojan Candidate, a friend...

Local papers in Wisconsin doing their job.

http://www.journaltimes.com/articles/2008/10/19/local_news/doc48fa891c6397b889391842.txt

http://www.wisn.com/news/17754232/detail.html

I will remain close to the story until every last drop of excitement has been squeezed out of it.

I think the danger of McCain and Palin's attacks against Obama's loyalty to America has been underestimated, even by those who realize that it's incitement to violence. The repercussions of anything happening to Obama as a result of the recent GOP candidates' rhetoric are potentially catastrophic.

In trying to link...

Notes From Chicago Fringe Theater:

I haven't been able to blog for a while. The RNC was just too repulsive, and the poll bounce afterward just too discouraging. I received a lot of messages from friends who felt the same way. We just won't be able to stand it...

I moved here twenty years ago last January. Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, had just died a few months earlier, and Eugene Sawyer was the interim mayor. Washington stalwart David Orr had been interim mayor briefly before him. I never understood the process by which...

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: your brain on substance.

I would like to sum up the pellet of reading matter linked to in this essay. It is an op-ed by William Kristol in the New York Times, entitled "Be Afraid. Please" which, in a nutshell, says...

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the gavel of the jolly drunk judge on the knuckles of the white-collar cutthroat.

I come not to praise Tim Russert, nor to bury him, nor even to insult him. He was an intelligent man, though he employed his intelligence in moderation. He...

There's a teeny tiny election tomorrow in Los Angeles, but it's very necessary that we let all our Angeleno friends know:

A crazy racial separatist is running for judge. Read the jarring details about Bill Johnson below. Then vote for Bianco, and "no" on propositions 98 and...

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the lifestyle of the sick and famished.

The promise of technology was to relieve us of onerous labors, leaving us more time for delight and relaxation. Instead, technology has provided new onerous labors to replace the old, placed greater production demands on the laborer,...

So I park my car, see, behind the post office on 19th and Ashland. And I get out of the car, see, and I am suddenly gagging because there is a smell on the wind like barf, like if you were standing over a paper shopping bag full of barf....

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: self-adhesive postage for those too parched from the dry white season to lick a stamp to post a letter to the human heart. Got it?

What is the word for a man who has himself filmed visiting a former Nazi concentration camp in order...

This is exactly what I was afraid of. I guess my complaining about the Northern League on Facebook was all for naught, now they have 85 seats in Parliament. Between the Pope, a former Hitler Youth, and the new mayor, "a former neo-fascist youth leader," the politics in...

Want to see a frightening graph?

And the Turkish don't have Ben Stein working his ass off to make them dumber. Soon the graph will have to include medieval Transylvania for the US to even show up on it.

Ben Stein and...

It's not enough John McCain wants to continue George W. Bush's policies, now Hillary does, too. Specifically, the policy of threatening other countries with destruction if they look at us wrong. If we wanted Bush again he wouldn't have a 28% approval rating. Don't they read the papers?

Here's the...

I apologize for the following. It was written in anger brought on by listening to All Things Considered for three whole minutes, a mistake I shall not repeat. Is NPR any better than Charles Gibson? No. In any case, the frothing lather below should be recognizable to anyone unfortunate...