Barack Obama has killed a man!
Is what I imagine GOP robo-calls in Nevada will soon say about 64-year-old Edmond Dewey Swensen, who dropped dead of a massive heart attack Oct. 18 while campaigning for the Illinois Senator and Democratic presidential candidate, according to the AP.
You can’t say it’s outside the realm of possibility, considering some of the ridiculous things people are saying in this election.
We actually just got a statement – and good laugh – from Springfield Republican Leader Michael Puppio today criticizing a visit to Chester by "this Marxist candidate" Tuesday, as it forced the Chester Upland School District to cancel school.
"It is not really surprising that this Marxist candidate who states that he wants to redistribute wealth would stoop to an all time low and allow the children in an underperforming school district to be used for his personal gain."
Yes. Shocking, I say, shocking that anyone would use the children of the Chester Upland School District as political pawns. The ultimate irony here being that that is what Republicans in the county have been doing forever.
(I cannot recall, by the way, Puppio ever publicly having said anything at all about CUSD until now. There’s certainly no record of it in our files.)
But here’s the thing: When you get a visit from a presidential candidate, there’s a lot of security involved. When that candidate has also been called a "traitor" (and worse) at rallies for his opponent – with, by the way, absolutely no control from that opponent over the frothing masses calling for Obama's death until chastised by the press – things get a wee bit heavy.
We’re talking Secret Service. Closed roads. Snipers. And probably Ashley Todd.
It wasn’t Obama’s choice to close the district for the day, either. That was left to Superintendent Gregory Thornton, who wasn’t about to send a bunch of kids into that maelstrom.
"Is this an example of the redistribution of wealth that Obama is talking about?" asked Puppio about the costs associated with closing a school district for a single day.
No, but thank God Obama said ‘redistribution of wealth’ rather than ‘shifting the tax burden,’ eh? Gives John McCain one last button to push on his Titanic of a campaign. With any luck, he’ll be able to tie ACORN into this somehow.

Speaking of which, I got an email the other day from a GOP operative that a former ACORN employee would soon be testifying as to the organization’s lackluster quality control.
Which presents something of a disconnect for the Republican party looking to invalidate all of ACORN’s registrations.
See, if ACORN is engaged in rampant voter registration fraud, that implies a purpose to entering fraudulent voter registration applications. But if they’re simply doing shoddy work, that implies they’re just, well, doing shoddy work.
It’s like the left-wingers who decry Bush as village idiot and, at the same time, an evil mastermind; or conservative crazies denouncing Obama’s spiritual upbringing under the inflammatory Rev. Wright while at the same time fearing he is a "secret Muslim."
Anyway, the whole thing is very confusing, but we can all pretty well assume that Pennsylvania is about to become the Florida of 2000 as far as court challenges, and if John McCain loses this one – that is, if the jackasses on the Supreme Court don’t hand it to him after a protracted legal battle – the drumbeat from the Right following this election will be an ACORN-orchestrated stolen election.

On a few unrelated but equally hilarious topics, the AP reported last week that a bank robber Friday made a getaway in high fashion: via limousine.
Yes, apparently a man in Texas held up a Comerica Bank – which, like Barack Obama, sounds dangerously ethnic and should probably therefore be feared – before jumping into the passenger side of a black limo, which sped away, according to the Associated Press. Police say they are looking for the suspect … and the limo.
Meanwhile, in Pontiac, Michigan, the dead were evicted following foreclosure on a funeral home. Five bodies and the cremated remains of 22 people were sent packing Friday from the House of Burns Memorial Chapel, according to the AP, which shows even death is no escape from the crisis on Wall Street.
And in Cleveland, a 56-year-old woman serving as her daughter’s surrogate delivered her own grandchildren!
And then I vomited!
According to a spokesman for the Cleveland Clinic's Hillcrest Hospital in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, Jaci Dalenberg, of Wooster, offered herself as a surrogate when daughter Kim Coseno and her husband were waiting to adopt, the AP reported. The couple used invitro fertilization and embryos were implanted in Dalenberg's uterus. She then spewed forth preemie triplets (triplets!) upon the face of the Earth, none of which, I'm sure, will have any severe psychological problems from being birthed by their grandmother.
And then there's Sony, who recently had to pull first-cut versions of its highly-anticipated Little Big World game, due to background music featuring Diabate's Symmetric Orchestra.
The reason? A track for the music on the "Swinging Safari" stage includes direct quotes from the Quran, which is a big no-no in the Muslim world. I never heard a thing about the track until now, but there was apparently enough backlash when it was incorporated into the game to get the thing recalled.
This isn't the first time this has happened, either. Apparently, bits of the Quran have been finding their way into videogames since the 1990s. Which made me wonder what the hell videogame developers are trying to accomplish until I remembered that an animator I met in L.A. said one of the main tenets of doing background work on Futurama was seeing how many penises he could stick in there, so maybe it's the same sort of joke.
If you're curious, the quotes were "kollo nafsin tha'iqatol mawt," which literally means, “Every soul shall have the taste of death” and "kollo man alaiha fan," which translates to, “All that is on earth will perish.”
Which is disappointing. I always hoped souls would taste like 72 virgins rather than death (which I hear tastes a lot like Sierra Mist).
And finally, Ted Stevens of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, was convicted Monday on seven counts of felony corruption charges. A 12-member federal jury unanimously found Stevens, 84, guilty of lying about home renovations and other gifts he received from an oil contractor valued at up to $250,000. He faces up to five years in prison on each count.
When told of the verdict, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said she was glad to hear the jury had cleared Stevens of any wrong-doing.