elfs | Brain: Wednesday, scraping the bottom

Obama's latest serious gaffe.: Barack Obama was giving a speech at the Congressional Black Caucus a few days ago and made a comment about how he and Michelle would be celebrating their 15th anniversary together next week.

Michelle Obama's team later issued a one-word press release: "Sixteenth."

Barack Obama just got every married man's vote right there.
John McCain: Highly Unlikely: Am I the only one who doubts the words of John McCain? I mean, it's genuinely scary that McCain says he "trust Sarah Palin's opinion" on energy, on the threats that we face from radical Islam, from "specific areas of the world." Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran, John?
Jimmy Carter,Jane Fonda, and Hollywood liberals: Steve Benen forwards us a copy of Orrin Hatch's latest fundraising email from the National Republican Committee. Let's do the Time Warp Again!
"George Bush was a laughingstock in the gray corridors of the UN.": In a savage article documenting how the United States has squandered its moral, political, and now economic power under the hand of George W. Bush, Spiegel looks back and notes just how sad the fall of the American Empire has been.
George W. Bush has grown old, erratic and rosy in the eight years of his presidency. Little remains of his combativeness or his enthusiasm for physical fitness. On this sunny Tuesday morning in New York, even his hair seemed messy and unkempt, his blue suit a little baggy around the shoulders, as Bush stepped onto the stage, for the eighth time, at the United Nations General Assembly.
McCain at the Des Moines Register: Losing his cool.: John McCain held a disastrous meeting with the editorial board of the Iowa Des Moines register, and watching him deal with the questions posed to him, you can see just how angry it makes him to be contradicted. He stands by his ads about the Obama "sex education" thing, claiming (very Rovian) that the editors have their statements and his team has his own. He seethes at the idea that conservatives might not like Sarah Palin, saying that he's not seeing that in the ground game (indeed, Sean and Nate at FiveThirtyEight document just how essential Sarah Palin is to motivating the ground game off its ass) and comes this close to calling such conservatives "RINOs," a term once directed at McCain himself.

But what the Hell is McCain doing there anyway? As Mike Murphy at Time points out, Obama's damn near got a lock on Iowa, the Register is a liberal paper and going to be rough on him, and seeking editorial endorsements is pointless in the age of the Internet. Why waste McCain's valuable campaign road time in Iowa, of all places?