A public service commercial from 1960

Walter Cronkite and Univac tally the 1952 election results

• An interesting and happy coincidence: not only is tomorrow Election Day, it’s Walter Cronkite’s 92nd birthday. Even though Cronkite continued to show up for Election Night coverage for many years after his 1981 retirement, he’s not expected to visit the CBS studios tomorrow night.


Typical McCain supporters

• Søren, a Mutual Friend of Torrez, has done an absolutely bang-up job of documenting all the many and varied ways the McCain-Palin campaign has lied, smeared, baited, and otherwise spread hatred and engendered so much shame and ignominy upon themselves that neither should ever be permitted to run for public office again and that the people who have run their appalling and disgraceful campaign should be banned from doing so ever again. I also recommend Søren’s post where he talks about the three basic types of fear-mongering.


Don’t give up the ship!

• Gore Vidal and others have penned an open letter to Barack Obama and the Democratic Party pleading with them not to concede the election if it is a close call for McCain until all ballot challenges have been thoroughly investigated and resolved. Both Al Gore and John Kerry conceded to George Bush well before the outcomes were finalized, giving the Bush campaigns the advantage in seeing those disputes resolved in their candidate’s favor, even though widespread fraud and tampering hampered accurate vote tallies. Since very little real election reform ever emerged from the outrage caused by these events, even such a symbolic gesture as a graceful concession takes on huge significance. (via The Seminal)


Day One: End Torture

• The American Civil Liberties Union has offered this agenda for the restoration of those civil liberties which were abrogated or severely weakened by the Bush Administration. The agenda is not targeted at Barack Obama specifically, though it’s a safe assumption that it is written with a President-elect Obama in mind, since it seems highly unlikely that John McCain would reverse any of the assaults on liberty made by Bush. Their call for Day One of the next administration: close the prison at Guantanamo, discontinue the policy of extraordinary rendition of prisoners to countries that practice torture, and issue an executive order immediately ending torture and abusive interrogation by ANY U.S. government personnel. It is a shameful moment indeed when a newly-elected President must be urged to do these things, and even worse to realize that, whichever man is elected tomorrow, these recommendations might not be heeded.

FREE COFFEE AND DILDOES FOR EVERYONE!!!

Well, okay not EVERYONE…just for people who go and vote tomorrow. But come on, kiddies, with the promise of a tall one and a stiff one, how could anyone over the legal voting age NOT take advantage of such an incredible deal?!?!?

And the sex toys come in both Republican AND Democrat flavors! There’s even a “Maverick Man Sleeve” for those of you who need a little “solitary confinement”. Unfortunately, while Obama, McCain and Palin are all memorialized in rubber, silicone and plastic for your erotic imagnings, there don’t seem to be any Joe Biden sex toys. Or maybe that’s a good thing…your call.

Or maybe you’d rather have ice cream. You sick pervert.

Food goes in, poop comes out, just like the digestive system of any living creature. Except it’s a work of art. I think.

Well, now here’s a job description you don’t hear every day: “professional vagina”

The linked page is an article written by a woman who works as a live pelvis model for medical students who must learn how to perform pelvic examinations as part of their training. While med students start out with plastic models similar to the one in the picture above, eventually they have to move on to examining real women — first, female cadavers, and then live subjects. Medical schools began hiring women to act as live models back in the 1970s; in the article the author says that initially med schools ended up with hookers, drug users, homeless women, and other desperate people in need of the few dollars they could get for allowing themselves to be subjected to pelvic exams (similarly, they use live models, male and female, for a variety of procedures that must be learned with living subjects).

I’m sure that those of you who are female will totally empathize with this woman who spends her days engaged in one of the most uncomfortable and embarrassing aspects of womanhood with a bunch of nervous first-time gyno-wannabes poking her privates for profit. Male readers are highly encouraged to read the article anyway, try as best we can to appreciate the indignity of it all, and learn something I’ll bet you never even thought about before. Thanks to Les at StupidEvilBastard.com for the link.