Josh Marshall deconstructs the biannual ACORN freak out:

ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What’s key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people — often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN’s own efforts to catch errors. (It’s important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it’s ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of ‘thousands’ of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve.

I’ve always had questions about whether this is a good way to do voter registration. And Democratic campaigns usually keep their distance. But here’s the key. This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for registering more people then they actually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won’t count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there’s very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit actual vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated cases of actual instances of vote fraud.

The original article has links to supporting sources that didn’t come across with my cut & paste. But, I figured this was important to post about given that, when I’m not hearing the McCain/Palin froth about Obama’s mysterious and dangerous love of terrorists, I am hearing a lot of right wing muttering something about ACORN these days. (I’m waxing nostalgic for two or three weeks ago when they were complaining about the poor, brown conspiracy to make the powerless rich people lend them money — that was at least kind of substantive.)

We’re still looking for evidence of this menace of voter impersonation at the polling place. If it’s as rampant as the discussions about it seem to imply and is so extensive as to taint our electoral process, it shouldn’t be that tough to find. And, let’s be clear: voter registration does not equal voting. If a guy signs “Mickey Mouse” on his registration, he still has to show up and vote as Mr. Mouse. Presumably these demands for evidence will be met by a Rumsfeldian koan like “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

So, if the fact that Obama sat on board funded by conservatives with a college professor who used to be a radical makes him too “risky” to be President; I suppose the fact that I got drunk on a number of occasions 15 years ago with the guy (white shirt and long hair) in this video probably disqualifies me from pretty much everything.

Dean Reynolds, a CBS News reporter, complains that the Obama campaign isn’t attentive enough to his needs; and offers a veiled threat that “what goes around comes around.” Cry me a river.

This is proof of nothing in particular, just a fun little video of a few of the chowder heads supporting McCain. The videographer’s point being that these folks are idiots if they are against Obama because he is “unknown” and “mysterious” while they apparently have no problem with supporting Sarah Palin about whom less is known than Obama.

I got a complementary issue of Running Magazine for having run in that half marathon. The “letters” section was devoted to a discussion of one of the editors’ previous rants against the use of iPods. The official position of organizing bodies is to ban iPods or other music players from races. This “rule” is universally ignored from anything I can see — maybe folks who are actually in danger of winning are subjected to the regulation, but slow moving cattle such as myself are not fazed by it.

The discussion had a certain “whippersnappers with their music players” quality to it. The curmudgeons who had always run without the players begrudged those who used them. There were reasons advanced about how those distracted by music interfered with others. I’ve also seen arguments advanced about how the music interferes with the purity of the run. The safety or interference arguments are mostly anecdotal; I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone point to anything like evidence that this is a Big Problem. For my part, I flat out would not have gotten through the early stages of running: those miserable few weeks where I couldn’t yet run 2 miles without stopping. The music really helped. Right now, I probably *could* do it, but it’s a lot more enjoyable to run with the music. When I have been in races, I have not noticed anyone getting in my way because of music players. I suspect that, for the curmudgeonly, when someone interferes with them, they notice it a lot more if the person has a music player — much as I notice it more if someone cuts me off in traffic has a “W” sticker or an “In God We Trust” plate.

The grumpy old man “that’s the way it was, and we liked it!” mentality certainly isn’t unique to running. There is always a contingent of elders who had to come up through the ranks of whatever without some luxury or in some way that was harder than those below them. In fraternities, for example, I suspect a lot of fraternities insist on hazing simply because the older guys had to go through it. They’ll tell you it needs to continue because it builds brotherhood and bonding. But there are other ways to do this than through sleep deprivation and forced consumption of raw eggs or whatever. Law firms will insist on abusive hours for new associates; and 72 hour residency shifts will be imposed on new doctors.

Tradition for tradition’s sake is a silly reason to continue (or prohibit) a practice.

Seemed mostly a draw to me which is a net loss for McCain since he needs to catch up. The snap polls show folks regarding Obama as the winner by a fair margin. Technology like the snap polls and the viewer-meters seem to short-circuit the ability of the spin machines to gear up a narrative that alters the perspective retroactively. (Gore’s “sigh” being a big deal, for example.)

Now, if there was a “sigh” moment from tonight, I’d say it’s McCain referring to Obama as “that one.”

Format sucked. Brokaw’s “Russia: Evil empire? Yes or no?” question was ridiculous.

I’m a geek. Here is a spreadsheet I am working on with some information about the Indiana House races. What I have done so far is to list each district, the Republican and Democrats in each district for 2008, the Republican and Democratic candidates in 2006, the vote totals in 2006, the margin of victory by totals and percentage in 2006. The districts are sorted by margin of victory (because of how I sorted, the high Democratic margins are listed first; the high Republican margins are listed last; and the closer districts are in the middle.) The districts where the margin was 10% or less are in bold. The districts with open seats are in italics.

This thing is definitely a work in progress. The great thing about local races like this are that they can rise and fall based on the people running as opposed to the major party brand name of the candidates. This spreadsheet won’t help identify those races. That said, it’s probably a fair assumption that districts that went heavily to one party or another won’t readily vote for the other party. (Of course, those districts where there was only one major party candidate fielded don’t really give a good sense of how readily the district will vote for the other party.)

My preliminary assessment is 38 safe Republican seats; 41 safe Democratic seats and 21 with some question about it. In all likelihood, there are more safe seats than that. In a couple of instances, where I noticed it, I indicated that Brian Howey had flagged the district as having some question, and a couple of times I noted the presence of a Libertarian candidate where it jumped out at me.

So, for what it’s worth – enjoy.

The Associated Press has a story entitled, “Mortgage Forgiven After Woman Shoots Herself.”

A 90 year old woman in Akron apparently owned her home outright in 1995. Then she took out a mortgage in 1997 and refinanced it a few times. Apparently she defaulted because a foreclosure action was brought by Countrywide and the home was sold at Sheriff’s sale to Fannie Mae which, in turn, sought to have her evicted when she refused to leave the house which was no longer hers.

When the Sheriff came to force the eviction, the woman shot herself in the chest. Fannie Mae has now decided to drop the eviction action and forgive the mortgage.

Call me cold-hearted, but it sounds like an ill-advised precedent to me.