Shaun Bowler, a political science professor at the University of California, Riverside, said Hale may have gotten votes because he was at the top of the ballot.

Too bad he wasn't in jail in Canada. He could have shown up at the next school board meeting sporting a brand new free tatoo

Romoland School District Board???

Must be a slow news day.

In Ohio, after months of crony pay-to-play scandals, voters rejected reform. I guess Ohioans are not fit for self-govt either.

In the United States, about 35% of those polled approve of a lying president, though, so what do you expect? Bush continues to insist that Congress had the same information he had, which is flatly false, and he must know that.

Josh Marshall catalogs the lies of the RNC, via RNC chair Mehlman. But these are the Republican talking points, so good to learn your way around them. Here's an excerpt, but you need to go the original to get the links that debunk the claims.

One was that the Senate intel report exonerated the administration of any effort to mislead the American people over Iraq. Wrong. They specifically did not look at that question.

He also said the Silbermann/Robb Commission concluded the same thing. Wrong. They too were specifically not authorized to examine that question.

He said the British Butler Report said the same thing. First of all, who cares what a Report written to cover Tony Blair said? Second of all, it said no such thing.

He said the Duelfer Report said Saddam "was trying to reconstitute his weapons programs." That is at best a highly, highly misleading description of the report.

He said that Saddam "had supported terrrorists, had terrorists operating out of his country." There are so many different lies and canards potentially underlying this claim it's hard to know where to start. But again, wrong. None of the purported evidence for this claim has ever stood up.

Oh, time to catch up on the new terms. What was torture is now "enhanced interrogation techniques" or "extraordinary rendition." What was lying is now "manipulating intelligence."

I declare Tubino the Winner of the Non-Sequitur Troll Award for today. You may resume your normal life. That is all.

Harry:

Can you give Bean-O a shot to the nuts for me? Do me a solid, man. (If you can mock him while he is writhing in pain on the ground, that's five bucks in your pocket, paisan.) I'd do it myself, but this might be construed as a response directly to him, which I have sworn never to do again.

P.S. - Hitting him in the neck with a cactus would also be acceptable.