Kindly Blow It

• What I'm Watching/Listening To/Reading:
• This clip, starting at 4:16 until the obvious payoff line, from The Amazing Race (which I think Tom mentioned in a comment) was not on "Reality Show Clip Time" on tonight's The Soup, but it should have been.
• I didn't read it until today, but David Brooks wrote a column about the same thing that I pondered last night regarding the GOP. It goes a long way towards explaining why places with fast-growing intellectual populations like Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina are quickly turning blue.
• Random Thoughts/Links:
• I dare you to watch this video and not get emotional at all.
• My wife and I celebrated our anniversary with a very nice dinner tonight along the river in Annapolis. I just can't imagine not living in a place with real water (i.e., an ocean or a Great Lake). It's so relaxing. I suppose that someone in Iowa or Nebraska would say the same thing about amber waves of grain, but they'd be wrong.
• Daily Rant:
• Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic is writing some good stuff, none better (or scarier) than this piece about the potential consequences of the Ayers fear-mongering. So, today McCain finally began to walk back some of this craziness and here's video proof. Unfortunately, on this same day, the McCain campaign took Obama to task for commenting on the racism and threats screamed out at McCain-Palin rallies over the last week. What's the message going to be? I do believe that McCain knows this is getting out of hand and, if nothing else, is beginning to seriously hurt him with rational voters. But when will Palin denounce these cries? It's Palin that is loved by the anti-intellectuals that David Brooks wrote about. Go to a site like FreeRepublic and read the comments about how great Palin is and how weak McCain is. Her words could calm this fire because she's one of them. But after all, McCain began to lose rational voters when he picked her in the first place, didn't he? And now she's found to have abused her authority -- the same thing that has become so unpopular about the current administration. So let's hope her culture warfare doesn't get anybody hurt between now and the night of November 4th (it's violence against African-Americans at polling places in the South that I fear the most, certainly more than any credible threat against Obama) and we can show how hope can prevail over hatred when all of God's children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and say: Good f***ing riddance.