Wednesday night, post-Zizek-lecture links.

* President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday. Probably the best of a bad set of options.

* How Food Preferences Vary by Political Ideology. I have to confess they have my number on Chinese/Japanese/Thai, not eating fast food, and delicious, delicious Samoas—but my love of pizza and PB&J proves that beneath my leftist facade beats a deeply reactionary heart.

* Already linked everywhere: Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer.

* Ezra Klein: Four ways to end the filibuster. Related: Steve Benen, Harold Meyerson, Kevin Drum.

* GOP Death Spiral Watch: Lindsay Graham censured by the South Carolina GOP for acknowledging the existence of climate change.

* Salon: Wes Anderson's take on Roald Dahl is possibly the best movie about family, community and poultry thievery ever made.

Obama teetering precariously on the edge of the Gerald Ford Horizon on yesterday's Saturday Night Live.

Shades of 30 Rock, a hastily made video for the Cleveland Tourism Board.

A little election news I didn't get to blog over the weekend.

* More on the improbable Sarah Palin prank call, including an explanation of how they did it. As with the compromising of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account, the key was social engineering.

"It really took a lot of work," he said.

"We had to go through the Secret Service, the people in her entourage. It's the biggest coup so far. We're proud to add (this prank) to our top hits."

* As a Conservative, I Must Say I Do Quite Like the Cut of this Obama Fellow's Jib.

* There's just no way Lois Lane votes Republican.

* A Pennsylvania judge has ruled against another GOP voter suppression scheme in the state.

* But student votes are still being illegally challenged in Virginia.

* McCain is doing a campaign event in his home state, never a good sign.

* And why did McCain go on Saturday Night Live to participate in a skit mocking not him but his running mate? Things must be getting pretty fratricidal over on Team McCain.

Don Draper's Guide to Picking Up Women. Proud to be part of the .5% of Americans who get this joke.

Let's talk about famous people.

* Larry David is waiting for November 4.

* Scott McClellan gives Barack Obama the kiss of death.

* Alan Greenspan's lost his faith.

* Will Ferrell returns to Saturday Night Live.

* And Stephen King again finds himself confronted by one of his own creations.

The polls are open on Sundays in North Carolina, so Jaimee and I are going out in a bit to do some canvassing. Here are some links in the meantime:

* Obama raised $150 million in September. Holy crap. That's almost twice (in a single month) what he would have had to spend between the conventions and election day if he'd accepted public financing.

Campaign manager David Plouffe, in an e-mail to supporters Sunday morning, said the campaign had added 632,000 new donors in September, for a total of 3.1 million contributors to the campaign. He said the average donation was $86.

* Daily Kos diarist dean4ever is keeping tabs on North Carolina early-voting numbers. Here's the three-day total through yesterday:

Noth Carolina saw 37,229 more early votes cast Saturday at an abbreviated slate of 103 sites in 34 of its 100 counties. A 17-day early voting period opened in North Carolina Thursday, and the three day total through Saturday evening is 251,709. The first Saturday in 2004 7,471 voted, and the 3-day total in '04 was 63,164.

and the comparison to 2004:

2008
Unaffiliated 16.46%
Republican 22.11%
Libertarian 0.04%
Democratic 61.39%

2004
Unaffiliated 12.62%
Republican 38.72%
Libertarian 0.14%
Democratic 48.52%

* Sarah Palin was on SNL last night.

* And since "associations" is the new buzzword in the race, it's important to take a look at Kos's rundown of one of John McCain's good friends, G. Gordon Liddy.

As Media Matters for America has noted, Liddy served four and a half years in prison in connection with his conviction for his role in the Watergate break-in and the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Liddy has acknowledged preparing to kill someone during the Ellsberg break-in "if necessary"; plotting to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotting with a "gangland figure" to murder Howard Hunt to stop him from cooperating with investigators; plotting to firebomb the Brookings Institution; and plotting to kidnap "leftist guerillas" at the 1972 Republican National Convention -- a plan he outlined to the Nixon administration using terminology borrowed from the Nazis. (The murder, firebombing, and kidnapping plots were never carried out; the break-ins were.) During the 1990s, Liddy reportedly instructed his radio audience on multiple occasions on how to shoot Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents and also reportedly said he had named his shooting targets after Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Why is John McCain palling around with G. Gordon Liddy?

SNL on Joe the Plumber.

A little bit of politics.

* Yesterday's Tina Fey/Sarah Palin skit was another instant classic. It's no exaggeration to say that Tina Fey may have single-handedly saved America from a Sarah Palin presidency, and for that she deserves our deepest thanks.



* As for what Gwen Ifill thought of the debate she (poorly) moderated, on Meet the Press this morning she seemed a little miffed that Palin "blew [her] off."

* For better or for worse Obama has decided that the Keating Five scandal is now fair game. I say "or for worse" only because it's not clear to me that aggressive negative campaign is still necessary anymore; the Ayers smear to which it is a response is very old news, and there's strong evidence that McCain has permanently damaged his own brand through his lying and smearing. There's also good reason to think McCain is already beat, which makes me wonder whether it's worth it at this point to climb back down to McCain's level and potentially damage the Obama brand as a consequence.

* Open Left also has a post on realignment elections with some nice very nice historical maps.

* And Nicholas Kristof tackles privilege in the time.

One of the fallacies this election season is that if Barack Obama is paying an electoral price for his skin tone, it must be because of racists.

On the contrary, the evidence is that Senator Obama is facing what scholars have dubbed “racism without racists.”

Midday links.

* John McCain advisor Steve Schmidt goes off on the Times for accurately reporting reality's well-known liberal bias.

* According to a recent poll, 0% of Americans believe the economy is improving. You read that right. I don't think I've ever seen a poll report where 100% of the sample agreed on something; Bush truly is a uniter and not a divider. By the way, the Decider's overall approval rating is now a thundering 19%.

* Which is probably why McCain-Palin is using so much of the Bush braintrust.

* McCain says we have to put an end to golden parachutes for bad CEOs like his advisor Carly Fiorina, who received $45 million from HP after running the company into the ground. This follows his blistering attacks on the influence of lobbyists in Washington like his campaign manager, Rick Davis, paid $2 million over five years to lobby on behalf of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“The value that he brought to the relationship was the closeness to Senator McCain and the possibility that Senator McCain was going to run for president again,” said Robert McCarson, a former spokesman for Fannie Mae, who said that while he worked there from 2000 to 2002, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together paid Mr. Davis’s firm $35,000 a month. Mr. Davis “didn’t really do anything,” Mr. McCarson, a Democrat, said.

* And who better to put in charge of rebuilding the economy but the man who destroyed it almost single-handedly, Phil Gramm?

* And Tina Fey has just one wish.

"I want to be done playing this lady Nov. 5," she said. "So if anybody can help me be done playing this lady Nov. 5, that would be good for me."

Sunday morning politics linkdump. Sorry for all these linkdumps, by the way—it was a busy week. Next week should see a return to a little bit more sustained commentary (including the exciting return of debate liveblogging!).

* There have been some interesting debates about poll biases lately. Ron Fournier (grumble) at the AP covers a study that argues Obama would be further ahead were it not for racial animus, by as many as six points. FiveThirtyEight throws cold water on this, as well as looking closely at the possibility of a "cellphone effect" in the polls. If Obama does 2.8% better in polls that include cellphones, that suggests a shifting map like the one below, turning Virginia light-blue and strengthening small Dem leads in Ohio and Colorado.



* A study from political scientist Alan Abramowitz argues that Obama will win, when all is said and done, with 54% of the popular vote. That he's naively comparing historical models with this year's unprecedentedly diverse tickets in both camps shows how seriously we should take this analysis.

* A new PPP poll shows North Carolina tied. Other recent polls show South Carolina within six, West Virginia within four, and MontanVoteRonPaula within two.

* There's evidence of a "Palin effect" in Florida driving undecided voters to Obama.

* The Spine tries to get a handle on Obama's early-voting advantage, beginning as early as this Friday in Virginia. The second link has some stats of interest for Dukies and Durham residents:

In addition, more early-voting centers are being located at colleges and universities, a change that significantly affects student turnout. Students at the University of North Carolina and N.C. State were able to vote on campus throughout the two weeks leading up to North Carolina's primary contest in April. At Duke University, however, students had to make their way to voting sites in the city of Durham. While turnout for Durham County was 52% in the Democratic primary, only 11% of eligible Duke students voted. This fall, however, Duke will have its own early-voting center, open for business starting Oct. 16.

* The McCain camp has successfully demanded the VP debate rules be changed to protect Sarah Palin.

*Judge orders Cheney not to destroy his VP records.

* SNL mocked McCain this week. He also preemptively mocked himself with an article in Contingencies arguing (for reals) that "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation." Straight out of the Dept. of Bad Timing. Obama's already taken aim at this.

* Will Obama raise my taxes? A helpful widget.

* And American Stranger has a long post on ideology that seems to take as one starting point my post on Slavoj Žižek, Obama Supporter. Essentially Ryan takes aim at the various binds the Left finds itself in with regard to political action, and I largely agree with what he says—though I certainly hope I wasn't in mind as his example of sell-out "liberal 'pragmatism' a la The New Republic." My point, both in the earlier post and now in this one, is simply that the U.S. President has a tremendous ability to make life better or worse for real people with real lives, all over the world, many of whom (believe it or not!) do not have cushy long-term contracts with elite universities. Naderite "Oh, they're all the same!" negativity only makes sense to people who are inoculated by class and privilege from the consequences of that power.

The mere recognition that the perfect not be the enemy of the good doesn't quite throw my lot in with TNR, I don't think, and certainly not so long as we also keep in mind that the good not be the enemy of the better. Our discomfort with pragmatic compromises—and we should be discomforted by them, every time and in every case—isn't by itself a reason not to be pragmatic.

Via Srinivas, Saturday Night Live makes the case for Clinton.