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– On our last blog, Lee and I used to make fun of right wingers. Matt Manweller was on the top of the list. And ick for ever to that guy.

– Melissa McEwan’s take on the John Koster story.

– Seattle’s plans for the storm season.

– Being wrong is the most important thing for conservative pundits.

– It’s a better world.

– I didn’t know anything about assassin bugs before reading this post.

I’m a pretty harsh critic of The Seattle Times. I think their coverage is more biased for a corporate status quo than they’ll care to admit and their editorials are sloppy and often off the mark. And with the ad for McKenna, they’ve put their partisanship on display.

But I don’t get any joy from their declining circulation numbers. For the best corrective to the Seattle Times’ sloppy efforts is better competition. When I read that they’d fallen off of the top 25 papers in the country, I thought of George Orwell’s lament at the end of World War Two that London only had 12 daily papers.

It is only when there are large numbers of newspapers, expressing all tendencies, that there is some chance of getting at the truth. Counting evenings, London has only twelve daily papers, and they cover the whole of the south of England and penetrate as far north as Glasgow. When they all decide to tell the same lie, there is no minority press to act as a check. In pre-war France the press was largely venal and scurrilous, but you could dig more news out of it than out of the British press, because every political faction had its paper and every viewpoint got a hearing.

Of course people get their news from the Internet now and from TV more than they did back then. But the biggest problem with TV news, with the Seattle Times, and most other daily papers in the region, is that they’re reporting from a similar perspective.

Well, it’s been something of a rough week for me. But I am mostly recovered now, I’ve been off narcotics for almost a day, and I’ll likely be discharged this evening.

With any luck, I’ll do a new poll analysis by late this evening or tomorrow morning. I’ve entered most of the polls up through yesterday, but since they were entered under the influence of morphine, I’ll have some error checking to do.

Oh…and sorry about Kentucky thing. That’s the kind of error I usually find before posting, typically while writing up the summary of polls. But I skipped all that to get up what I figured to be the last analysis for awhile.

Just looking at the polls that have come in, I see no big shake-ups. I expect Obama will still be above a 90% probability of winning and somewhere around a mean of 300 electoral votes.

I thought I might be all out of what the fucks this campaign season. Especially after the shitty hurricane coverage. But there’s still at least one more. What the fuck, John Koster?

Koster: “When a mother’s life in in danger. I’m not going to make that decision. You know, I know they go out and… incest is so rare, I mean, it’s so rare. But the rape thing…you know, I know a woman who was raped and kept her child, gave it up for adoption, she doesn’t regret it. In fact, she’s a big pro-life proponent. But on the rape thing, it’s like, how does putting more violence onto a woman’s body and taking the life of an innocent child that’s a consequence of this crime, how does that make it better? You know what I mean?”

First off, if that story is true it doesn’t really change the facts for the women who get an abortion after being raped. If a woman decides to have a kid after being raped, I want to live in a society that respects that. But society should have just as much respect for a woman who doesn’t want to bring her rapist’s child into the world.

Now I think all women should be able to make that decision for themselves under any circumstances. But it’s tough to imagine that a person wouldn’t feel a little compassion sneak in when we’re talking about rape victims.

– Aside from the anti-bus one, I like these reasons to bike to work.

– I’m not an evangelical, and we live in a secular society is a better response on policy than to tell them what they should believe about religion. But the relatively recent change to opposition to abortion in the evangelical community is pretty fascinating.

– Good for Italy.

– Bogus photos, however, are a strange new form of popular expression attached to unfolding crises, hovering somewhere on the boundary between art and commentary.

– Obviously, it’s limited in geography and scope, but I think the MTA Flickr had the best pictures.

– When I was in England and people would ask me why people call it football, I would tell them it was because the ball was shaped like a foot. I like this answer better.

I don’t care how desperate you are for a local angle on the biggest story right now. If the story you’ve decided to write is What does Michael Brown think of Sandy (h/t) you’re writing the wrong goddamn story. I mean maybe if you preface it with, and do the opposite of what this fucker says.

Seriously, after his monumental fuckup in the wake of Katrina why the hell would you ask his opinion if you had a hangnail? Honestly.

Also, even if you didn’t know it was this fucker, that’s really terrible advice. Obama is being too prepared for a disaster and Something something Benghazi.

Seriously. It’s cheap enough to be like “storm good for candidate arrrgh” or “Storm Bad for candidate!” But to be both for no real reason other than to just have something to say? Boo.

And yes, I realize that if you’re a pundit, you have to keep doing punditry. But maybe take a breath or some shit. I don’t know.

Just to be clear, I’m not inherently opposed to tying Sandy to the presidential election. It’s a week away, and Sandy may have an impact. But when there is a disaster, maybe step up your game.

Please join us tonight for a special edition of the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally, where we’ll all raise a pint in honor of Darryl’s aging pancreas.

We meet every Tuesday at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Starting time is 8:00pm. Some people show up earlier for Dinner.

Our gatherings are informal. If you show up and don’t immediately recognize the pack of liberals, ask a bartender or server.

Over lunch today, I was putting together a post with the latest election analysis. I started feeling bad. It got worse, and to make a long story short, I ended up in the ER.

The diagnosis is pancreatitis. So, I’ll be in the hospital for a couple of days, receiving morphine for the pain. I will try to finish an abbreviated poll analysis, but it will include only polls through this morning.

Morphine makes me tired.

– If you’ve got any money left over after campaign giving season, this kickstarter for Bezango, WA looks pretty good (h/t).

– Larry Stickney, as you can see, is super concerned with privacy.

– I’m still put off by Powell’s endorsement because of the war. But John McCain doesn’t really have a right to complain.

– And Barbara Guzzo, organizer of Catholics for Marriage, argued that the bishops have brought “anguish, division and sadness” to the faithful, “particularly those with a gay person in their families, the hurt that this has caused.”

– Still have to take some time to digest this XKCD on the partisan makeup of Congress

Who’da thunk it?

The home of such dreck as Pawn Stars, Ice Road Truckers, and Only in America with Larry The Cable Guy may have actually gotten something almost right, almost historically accurate:

That’s the trailer for an episode of “Mega Disasters” on The History Channel, ordinarily as misnamed a channel as there can be. What the environs of New York City are facing in the next few days may, in fact, be even more catastrophic than that program envisions. To wit:

• The storm depicted in the show comes up the coast, basically tracking toward the northeast. Hurricane Sandy is expected to travel in a northwesterly direction, churning into New York Harbor directly from the open ocean.
• The hypothetical storm moves very fast, with clear skies arriving within less than a day. Sandy, we’re told, will stall over Pennsylvania for days, deluging the entire Northeast under at least 6-12 inches of rain.
• Coming at the end of October, newly-fallen leaves will obstruct and clog storm drains, making for faster and deeper flooding than would happen in the September timeframe of the TV show’s storm.
• As a final kicker in the real scenario, Monday, October 29 is a full moon, when tides are always at their highest. High tides at the Battery will occur at 8:31am and 8:53pm Monday, 9:06am and 9:32pm Tuesday, and 9:40am and 10:13pm Wednesday.

Here’s hoping it isn’t nearly as serious as the dire predictions are telling us. I expect to hear reports from my nephew, who lives near Lincoln Center, once the worst passes … if there’s any electric power in the area, that is.

PS. This is Bruce’s Sandy:

Last week’s contest was unsolved as of Thursday night. It was in Yakima.

This week’s contest is related to something in the news from October, good luck!

[HA Bible Study is on hiatus through the November election as we honor Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney by studying the scriptures of his Mormon religion.]

Doctrine and Covenants 130:22
The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us.

Discuss.