These days, Twitter is one of the major ways to share your posts. And everything else you feel like. The signal to noise ratio is not the best, but it is far too widespread (and spreading) to ignore. And making it easy for people to follow you there means a ready made audience you can tell about your new posts. So the first thing you need to do is add a button on your site so they can follow you. Then, make it easy for yourself to post tweets about your posts. Oh, and check out Dan Zarrella’s advice about what words to use when tweeting your post.

Tweet Tweet

TweetMe does not have many options right now. The only one is the ability to change the template message. The author wanted a plugin that would sent a tweet when he posted a blog entry, then wouldn’t when he edited it. This plugin does that, using bit.ly for short URLs. If that is all you want for every post, this is probably the plugin for you.

Twitme automatically sends a tweet to Twitter every time you post. It sets up a separate menu on your dashboard where you put in your account name and password, it will then post a link to your new posts. You can choose to exclude categories, which allows you to focus what you share there, and you can set an auto-reply for people that start following you. The message you send can either be a template or a short post summer, both with the URL (regular or shortened) of your post.

A very nice feature is the ability to follow your Twitter account from right there on your dashboard. Including showing your followers and allowing you to send tweets or direct messages from there. Not hard to set up, and automates one of the most important ways to publicize your posts on the web today. A choice of URL shorting service and finer control over which pages and posts are sent would be nice additions, but are fairly minor points.

WP to Twitter also auto-tweets your new posts to Twitter. One of the thing that endeared this one to me is that it checks your server to see if you have the necessary php functions for it to work. This is one answer to a pet peeve of mine. There are quite a few options available for this plugin, including tweeting new pages, additions to your blogroll, sending tweets when you remote publish, and integrating Google Analytics, including channels.

It uses Cli.gs on your tweets, and if you have an account there you can see the traffic associated with your short URLs. You can set it to auto-tweet your posts, or only when you check a box on the edit page. And you can write the tweet right there on your edit page at the same time. One of the major parts of the plugin is support for multiple authors, allowing each to use their own Twitter account. A more involved setup, but a huge amount of flexibility.

Tweetbacks is not a way for others to follow you. It is for putting tweets about your posts into the comments section of the post. It defaults to putting the tweets right into your comment stream, but the author gives instructions for hacking your php to separate your tweetbacks from your comments and pingbacks.

You can block specific usernames, and clean up your database to remove spammers that get through, and it allows you to block retweets. It will also pick up old tweets about your posts from before adding the plugin and add them in. There have been some issues with spamming comments getting into feeds, so it is important to keep an eye on what is coming into your site. A good idea, but use with caution.

Twitter Tools is a very popular plugin, and looking at the options it is easy to see why. It gives you the ability to automatically tweet about posts, or to decide on a post by post basis what is sent. It will also post your tweets on your blog individually and create a digest post of your tweets, either daily, weekly, or both, allowing you to set the time the post is created. It also provides a sidebar widget that shows your recent tweets and allows you to post from right there to Twitter.

Unfortunately, there are some serious downsides to the plugin. You have no control over the message sent to Twitter, it is hardcoded into the plugin to avoid a loop of posts and tweets. It doesn’t use a URL shortening service, but the author does provide a hook that can be used to pass the URL to a service. The widget has no style of its own, but it does have some CSS tags that can be styled if you dig them out. There are some nice features to this plugin, but the necessity of coding CSS or PHP to do things other do out of the box means it is probably not a good fit for most people.

Tweet This is not a plugin for tweeting your posts on Twitter. At least not by you. It places a Twitter icon at the bottom of your post for your readers to use, just like other other social site icons. If they click on the icon, it takes them to Twitter, with the post title and shortened URL already in the text box. You can modify the exact message placed in the text box, and you have your choice of 16 different ways of shortening the URL. There are also a decent number of options on placing the icons on pages and posts. And you can choose to have a list of the tweets about the post under the content.

Despite the name of the plugin, it is not just for Twitter. The author has included 7 other services, including Digg, StumbleUpon, Plurk, and Ping.fm. None of them have as many icon choices as Twitter, although still a nice variety, and there is no listing of how many times they have been used. A nice plugin, that can make it easier for your readers to share your posts, but aside from choosing the URL shortening service and the listing of how often the post is tweeted, it is not too different from the plugins I looked at last week. I have to say, the author does give great support on his blog.

There is one more plugin to keep an eye on. If you really want to integrate Twitter into your blog, TweetSuite is a one stop shop for pretty much everything you could want to add. Buttons for your readers to tweet and retweet your posts, tweetbacks, auto-tweet new posts, and 4 different widgets for your sidebar. And an impressive amount of control of all of them.

Sad to say, there a few things missing that keep this from having everything. First, there is no way to post a tweet from your site. Not a major problem, there are so many ways to post already it is hard to keep up. The second thing is a lack of fine control over the auto-tweet function. It is not possible to designate whether individual posts will or won’t be sent to Twitter. It is all or none. And what is posted is also somewhat lacking. Finally, there is no Follow Me option on any of the widgets. But the plugin is still basically in beta, with the author wanting to add in more features. As it stands, it is already a very nice plugin, not too hard to install, with loads of features.

Final Words

So there are 6 finished and 1 unfinished plugins for getting your blog posts to Twitter. And vice versa in a couple of cases. You should be able to find something that suits your needs in the list, but if you don’t, don’t despair. This is far from all of the available Twitter plugins, but I need to cut things off somewhere.

I have been thinking about adding some ads on my site. I do not expect to make a living doing this, or even really make any money. I do not have a focus, which as many of the money making blogs point out, is really necessary. But it would be nice if I can get enough to occasionally defray some of the costs for my hosting. In that vein, I decided to look at the plugins out there that help handle ads on Wordpress.

And there are a lot of them. A large number are specifically made for using Google Adsense ads, but there are more that allow ads from other programs. I only wanted ones that work in Wordpress 2.7, which meant I didn’t look at a couple that had nice sounding features, but hadn’t been updated in several months.

Adsense Program plugins

• AdsenseAnna is probably the easiest plugin to use. It gives you a single widget for your sidebar, and you just need three things to get it going. A name for the widget, your Adsense-ID number, and what size you want the ad to be. And you chose the size from a drop down menu that looks like it has all the options that Google offers. No copy and paste of code, no worrying about how many ads are on a page, just input your ID and save. The only short coming is only one ad block is placed. You can’t have one anywhere but your sidebar with this plugin.
• EasyAdSenser limits your options for ad placement more than some of the other plugins, but does include an option for an ad in your sidebar, along with a Google search bar. You need to copy and paste your Adsense code from Google, but this lets you chose different size ads for different locations. There are also two ways to prevent ads showing on a particular page or post. The search bar on this one, along with the sidebar ad, makes this plugin stand out.

AdSense and Other Programs

• AdSense Integrator is a nice way to add code into a page in a variety of areas. It is probably the most versatile plugin, since you can decide exactly which posts and/or pages you want an ad to appear on. Including your Archives, Category, and Tags pages. It also allows you to place ads exactly where you want them on the page using a small checkbox gui. You do need to copy the ad script into a box on the setup page, which is one of the things that makes this useful for multiple ad campaigns. You can even set it so that ads from different programs appear on the same page/post in different places. Or ads from one program on pages, another program on posts. The only real shortcoming is the lack of a widget for sidebar placement. But the authors are working on that.
• All in One Adsense and YPN allows you to place ads from 2 different programs, Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher’s Network. You can use either program alone, or both at the same time. Set up is easy, you just need to paste your ID number from either program into the setup page, choose the ad size, and the number of ads per page. A lot of placement options for ads, including random, on your pages. It lets you decide if you want ads on particular pages and/or posts, and gives you two short codes to give you more control over placement. It is limited to the 2 programs, and has no option for sidebar placement of ads. And the size of the ads is limited also, probably to only the sizes used in both programs.
• Ozh Who Sees Ads is a more complicated plugin to use. It allows you to control who sees an ad, so regular readers are not annoyed by a lot of them, but search engine visitors see them regularly. It can be used with any program, and you can place ads anywhere you want in a post using the generated comment codes, which are in a dropdown on the HTML editor. You can also place ads in your sidebars, but it requires editing the php file and placing that generated php code. Not the easiest plugin to set up, but can definitely be worth the effort.
• Smart Ads is another plugin that is useful for any ad program. You need to paste your generated code into the appropriate box, it will be placed either before, after, or both places in your post. You can also use a custom box that will placed where ever you put a shortcode on your blog. You can also choose to exclude particular categories from having ads shown, or not have ads appear on short posts or for registered members. But it does not have any options for sidebar placement.
• Shantanu’s WP Prefix Suffix Plugin is not really an ad plugin. It allows you to add some form of content, text, HTML/CSS, javascript, etc., before, after, or in the middle of the a page or post. It can easily be used for ads, you just need to paste the code into one of the 3 input boxed, depending on where you want the ad to appear. And you have control over whether it appears on pages, posts, your homepage, and your excerpts. Easy to set up, and can be very useful for all kinds of things, but somewhat limited for ad placement.

Other Programs Only

• Chitika | Premium plugin is only for the Chitika Premium program. According to their FAQ, you are allowed to show Chitika ads on the same pages as Adsense ads, even encouraging you to ask your Adsense rep to make sure. There are limited options for ad placement, basically above or below your post, although there are a variety of ad sizes and you can keep ads from appearing by using a shortcode.  Like many other plugins, there is no option for sidebar placement with it.

So there you are. Several choices for putting ads on your blog and making a little money. Some of them place a linkback to the author’s site, others give you the option of letting the author replace one of your ads with theirs a fraction of the time, still others just ask for a donation. None of these options seem unreasonable, since you are using their work to (hopefully) make money, and on these plugins at least, you can decide if and how much any ad replacement takes place.

As for which one I will use? I am not certain yet. There is always the question of versatility versus ease of use. I am leaning toward Easy Adsenser because of the two widgets for the sidebar as well as the ads in the posts. Or it would probably be possible to combine AdSenseAnna with one of the others that does not have a sidebar option, although that would require care not to break the various placement rules.

I play the MMO City of Heroes. Started the first day it was released and have been on it ever since. I don’t always play a lot, but I do like jumping on and beating up villains from time to time. Or beating up heroes, if I feel like being a villain at the moment. (Mayhem missions are much more fun than Safeguard missions.)So they recently released a game client for the Mac. This does not really affect me, since I am on a Windows machine. But they have done a couple of ads to use in pushing the new client to a new audience. This one was just released and I had to share.

An obvious parody of the I’m a Mac/I’m a PC commercials, but in a fun way. The first one is also quite funny.

And if you are not a player, you should check it out. Easy game and very friendly to casual players. The forums are even friendly to visit.

They are still counting in Minnesota. All kinds of people, both on the web and on the news have made statements about the length of time it is taking. But everything I have seen seems to be showing that the election officials there are doing their best to be fair and unbiased. They want all the votes that should be counted, counted, no matter who they are for. That is the way things are supposed to work in elections in this country. And it is one reason I am against all electronic voting. Optical scan has some problems, but it does leave a ballot that the voter has marked, which can be physically looked at if there is a need. There is an election in Virginia’s 5th district, where most of the recount entails running the machines again to see what their memory cards say.

What happens if the number is different? How can it change if it is only an electronic record and no one has used the machine since the memory was read on election day? So the number on the DREs should be the exact same, with the only differences possible on the absentee or provisional ballots. Virginia has at least stopped buying those machines. Now they need to stop using the ones they have.

But back to Minnesota. Nate Silver, the wunderkind at FiveThirtyEight.com, has made a prediction about the election, Franken by 27 votes. I am not certain he is completely serious about that. But it does seem to be the number that his math leads to. Of course, he is a statistician, so there is a built in margin of error in his work. That just doesn’t sound as good as a post title. And probably wouldn’t get him mentioned on Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, or Huffington Post as often. Besides, what if he is right.

Right now, the Star Tribune is letting anybody that wants to get a look at what the Canvassing Board will have to go through when they start looking at things. Minnesota Senate Recount: Vote on the Franken-Coleman ballot challenges.

I didn’t get all the way through the original 599, but of the 100+ I did look at, most of them were challenged for pretty frivolous reasons. A large number were challenged for having an identifying mark, when the only mark that I could find was the presence of a write-in candidate. While a particular write-in could be used to identify a ballot (Lizard People anyone?) you can’t use that as a basis for not counting the ballot. Otherwise you nullify the entire concept of having a write-in. And these challenges were coming from both campaigns. They should both shut down that kind of thing and limit their challenges to things that actually make sense, like extra marks and unclear voter intent.

I understand the PR and political reasons for all the extra challenges, but it is really a wast of time and money, since the Canvassing Board will throw those challenges out. All it will really do is irritate them, when they should be the people you least want mad at you.

It was a pretty good weekend, except for the parts that weren’t. I guess that technically fits all weekends, but at least most of this one was good. Well okay, most of it wasn’t really good. It just wasn’t bad.

Went over to see friends in Indiana Friday night. This is a pretty regular thing, we try to get together every Friday, although we do sometimes have scheduling problems, like holidays, vacations, or illness. We have been doing this for years. Actually, we have been doing it for a couple of decades at this point. We started after college graduation and have kept it up ever since. Even when I moved to Virginia for five years, the others continued getting together. We originally got together on Saturday nights, but moved it to Friday nights earlier this year because it worked better for work schedules.

Why do we go this, for over 20 years now? Well, for one, we like each other. We don’t agree about a lot of things, like politics or religion, but we still like spending time together. We show up, usually at Linda’s house, and spend several hours talking and playing games.

Guess I forgot to mention the games. That is how we started hanging out during college. Sort of. Most of us met and became friends and started playing games there. We had heard about some sort of game dealing with wizards and dragons and wanted to try it. So we found some Basic Edition Dungeons & Dragons and basically taught ourselves how to play. Our DM at the time was not the best, but we still enjoyed the games.

From there, we expanded to board games, especially Risk. We also played other thing, like Rook, Shogun, and Civilization. We were pretty open to playing about anything, as long as we enjoyed it.

Getting older did slow us down a bit. Jobs made it harder to find the time, I lived an hour away from the rest of the group, then I moved to Virginia. But the others kept getting together and playing games. We went to Gencons (before it was in Indy), Origins (I still get to this one as much as possible), and a local game con. One of us died very suddenly on a Saturday morning, a few hours before we got together, leaving his wife and 3 daughters. And still we get together as much as possible.

These days we mostly play train games. We started with Rail Baron, then moved on to the Empire Builder games. We own all the versions and like playing them, but the India version is pretty much our favorite. Well, I am not liking it all that well after the last 2 weekends. My game both weekends was poor to say the least. But that is how it goes sometimes, you just don’t get the cards you need when you need them.

We also played a couple of games of Ticket to Ride using the USA 1910 cards. We like that version because of the large number tickets available, making each game so different. We also play the Switzerland version on occasion. It can get pretty cutthroat, but is still fun. I did manage to win one game of Ticket to Ride, but again failed miserably at the second.

So it was mainly a losing effort Friday night. An hour drive, got my butt kicked at multiple games, then an hour home. Lots of fun. Wish we could get together this week, but the holiday schedule makes it impossible.

Saturday was more fun. I drove to Kentucky and participated in an orienteering event put on by the Orienteering Cincinnati group. It was marginally closer than the event the IndyO people were running. Considering how badly I did, the less time I had to drive to get home, the better.

I do not expect to do extremely well at the events. I left myself get too out of shape over the last year for that. I go to get out of my house, get some exercise, and basically have a fun walk through the woods. But that doesn’t mean I want to do badly on the course. And this time I did. I was doing the orange course and read the map wrong at the first control. (A minor mistake, after all, how important is reading the map at an orienteering event.) So I found the second control first, realized what I had done, and had to go back to the first control, then back to the second. Given my slow speed, this was a real problem.

So I walked through the woods, occasionally frustrated, usually sweating, and trying to find the shortest way between two points. Since I like the straight line definition, I did some of the sections the hard way. It was mostly fun, except for the cramps I had most of the time in my quadriceps. I didn’t warm up enough before starting, and it was a chilly day. They were painful, and driving for over 2 hours getting home didn’t help. Which was why Sunday was not a fun day at all.

Which pretty much leads me back to my first paragraph. It was a good weekend. Except for the times it wasn’t.

Have you ever thought about makes someone really attractive to you? Not just physically attractive, but that something more that keeps you coming back.  I am not an expert on relationships, or attractiveness, but I have at least started figuring out what it is that really makes a woman stand out for me.

Different aspects of women stand out more for different men. This is what gives rise to men saying they are “leg men” or “butt men”. And of course, there are the men that are mostly attracted to women’s breasts. Nothing wrong with any of these of course, and I certainly like looking at each of them. But the thing that really makes a woman stand out for me is her smile.

Julia Roberts laughs after Richard Gere surprises her during filming.

Any smile is very nice to see, but some of them change a woman from “nice to look at” to “I want to spend as much time with you as possible.” I don’t know exactly what it is about a particular smile that makes the woman more attractive. It certainly isn’t a function of her overall attractiveness.

Julia Roberts is one woman that does have a starting point for getting my attention. Yes, she is a very attractive woman, even now at age 41 and after 3 children. But there are plenty of very attractive woman, both in and out of the entertainment business. What makes her stand out for me is the scene from Pretty Woman in the picture. When she reached to touch the necklace in the box, Richard Gere snapped the cover down on her fingers. This was not in the script, he just did it as a joke. But her spontaneous reaction resulted in it being placed in the movie.

That reaction, laughter and a huge smile, is what makes her so attractive to me. Enough so that I like her in most of her movies. I can’t say all, I have not seen all of them. But it is likely that I will.

Not that celebrities are the only people that have that kind of smile. In fact, most of them do not have that kind of effect on me. Probably because they have to spend so much of their time smiling for the public, it is hard to see a genuine smile from them. And I have to at least perceive the smiles as genuine for them to make the woman out of the ordinary.

And the two women whose smiles have had the greatest impact on me are not celebrities. I will probably talk about them later. For now, I guess I will just look for more great smiles.

The first line in this story from USA Today is a telling indictment of someone who is widely considered a man of honor. “Sen. John McCain is scheduled to visit Georgia on Thursday to campaign for GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss, and Sarah Palin may not be far behind.” It is not the fact that McCain is stumping for a Republican that is a failure of principles. That is expected from the person considered to be the head of the party. It is the man he is stumping for that is the problem.

Chambliss is the person that was responsible for running ads during the 2002 Senate campaign that attacked Max Cleland’s patriotism and commitment to the security of the United States. The ads were called “beyond offensive to me” and “[I]t’s worse than disgraceful, it’s reprehensible.” These aren’t the words of some liberal whiner. They are the words of Republican Senators Chuck Hagel and John McCain, respectively.

These were the same kind of ads that Karl Rove developed and used against John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries in South Carolina. McCain said “I believe that there is a special place in hell for people like those.” referring to the people that used his daughter in push polls. But he had the same people working for him in his 2008 campaign.

And that same primary showed that McCain was not all that committed to his principles. The controversy over the Confederate Flag during that campaign resulted in him admitting “I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So I chose to compromise my principles.”

For a man that is supposed to be a maverick, who promised to always tell the truth about his beliefs, McCain seems to spend a lot of time failing to actually follow his principles. He showed “poor judgement” in the Keating Five mess, lied about his beliefs regarding the Confederate Flag controversy in South Carolina, then hired people he earlier called reprehensible to work for him in his Presidential Campaign. And now he is campaigning for Chambliss, a man that uses any means he has to win.

Maybe all of this isn’t a failure of his principles. Maybe his principles are actually exactly what he has been showing us. He wants to win, and is willing to do anything he has to in order to do that. I do not know the man personally, I have to go with what is on the public record. And that record is getting more and more damning.

Yes, I know this is a bit late. Everybody and their brother has been talking about Tuesday and Obama’s win. I had given some thought to driving over to Chicago and standing outside the fence at Obama’s party. But I figured that they wouldn’t call the election until late, and I would have a 4 or 5 hour drive home afterward. So I decided to call the local Obama campaign back and offer to work on the GOTV effort Tuesday, then get a pizza and watch MSNBC and CNN after the polls closed. Then I got a call on Monday afternoon that changed my plans.

I voted in September, the first day it was available. I am pretty sure I was the first person in the county to vote, since they were still sorting out the ballots they had just received from the printer when I went in. While I was there, I offered to work at the polls on election day if they needed me. They signed me up for the training class and put me on the list of people to call if needed. They were pretty happy to have me, since there are not that many people registered as Democrats in this part of the country.

I knew they had me on their list, but they did not call, so I figured I was free to do what I wanted on the 4th. Then the Board of Elections called me at about 4:30 in the afternoon on November 3rd. Could I work the polls the next day, they had 3 people call in sick. I said yes so the next morning, I had to be at the Junior Fair Building at the County Fairground at 5:45 AM.

5:45 AM, heading in to work the polls on November 4, 2008.

Why would anyone think I was tired, just because I couldn’t hold the camera steady. The really bad part about needing to be there so early is the fact that my normal schedule has me going to sleep about 4 or 5 AM. I managed to get about 3 1/2 hours sleep before getting up and heading to the polling place. But I have a harder time handling lack of sleep than I did when I was younger. Imagine that.

The ladies I was working with were surprised to see me, apparently no one had told them the woman they normally worked with was not going to be there. But they quickly put me in her normal place, and showed me what to do.

People marking their ballots or waiting to do so at 10 AM.

Things progress fairly smoothly during the day. There were quite a few people waiting in line when the polls opened at 6:30 AM, and they quickly found their precinct table and got their ballots. Then there was a wait, since there were not enough booths for everyone at once.

It was not a long wait for most people, despite the size of the ballot. I got the impression that quite a few people were either just marking the races for offices and local issues or they had researched the Ohio constitutional issues before they came in to vote. I would prefer the second, since I rather like the idea of an informed electorate.

More people coming in, at about 4:30 PM.

The stream of voters was pretty steady all day long, at least for the precinct I was working in. We never had more than 4 people going through the process or waiting in line, but we seldom had more than 15 or 20 minutes without someone wanting to vote.

We didn’t mind this, since it really helped to keep us busy and made time fly by. With a 15 hour day working the polls, anything that made things seem faster was welcome. Even if it meant they interrupted us while we were eating at the table.

Waiting to drop ballots in voting machine, 6:15 PM.

On the other hand, one of the other precincts apparently had a bus load of people all come in at once. They had a line going out of the building waiting to get their ballot, then waiting to mark their ballots. And after they did that, they had to wait in line again to put their ballot into the scanning machines. I am sure some of them were less than happy about all the waiting, but I didn’t see any anger or hear anything about them being really upset.

Things really slowed down for us during the last hour, with only a few people coming in to our precinct. None of the precincts were really busy, there were only 3 or 4 people still voting when the 7:30 announcement that voting was over was given. Then came closing things down.

A precinct captain making certain that she had the correct procedure.

Besides making sure that all the numbers added in our books, we had to sort out and count all of the ballots. Since each of the machines had several precincts in it, that took quite a while. It didn’t help while you were counting when someone from another precinct would come over and give you a ballot that had been missed during the sorting. On one of those occasions, all 4 of us at our table had to start over after losing track of where we were.

How long it took each precinct depended on how many voters they had and how well the numbers matched. When you finished and were 2 ballots off, you were happy if someone showed up and gave them to you, even if it did mess up your counting.

Different precincts in different stages of sorting and counting ballots.

There were two women at our building acting as poll watchers. They wandered around all day, watching what was happening, occasionally asking questions and helping voters with questions they had. After the polls closed, I asked them who they were with and they told me the Democratic Party.

I understand the desire of the Democratic Party to make sure that everyone got to vote and the votes were counted accurately after 2000 and 2004. But having observers at places like Van Wert is pretty much a waste of resources. The people that worked with me were happy to help anyone vote, and did their best to make sure that everyone that came in wanting to vote had the chance, no matter who they wanted to vote for. I only know of one man that didn’t get to vote, he couldn’t remember the last time he had voted and he had not made sure he was registered before the deadline. And our precinct captain spent almost a half an hour making certain there was not way he could cast a vote.

I wouldn’t say I had a fun day. I enjoyed talking to the ladies I was working with, and I have always enjoyed doing things like this or serving on juries. I understand that makes me somewhat weird, but it is hardly the only thing. I may or may not do this again. It will depend on a lot of things, mostly how much free time I have. But I am glad I did it this time.

Leaving the building after the fun is over, 9 PM.

The Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner (D) has been having a bit of a tiff with the Republican Party the last month or so. They keep insisting that too many people are wanting to do radical things like vote in the General Election. Unlike her predecessor, she keeps telling them that, well, that is allowed, even if the voters are probably Democrats. So the two sides went to court until the US Supreme Court said the GOP was not actually allowed to go to court over the issue.

Since they were not allowed to bring suit, the GOP decided to pull out the big guns. Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) asked President Bush and the Department of Justice to investigate, saying that otherwise “there is a significant risk if not a certainty, that unlawful votes will be cast and counted.” He is correct to a certain extent, there will be unlawful votes cast and counted in the upcoming election.

But that will happen no matter what is done. Expecting that out of the millions of votes that will be cast in Ohio all of them are legal and that nobody in the entire state is trying to vote illegally is naive. But trying to say that there will be enough illegal votes cast to have any kind of affect on the outcome of the race is disingenuous. Increasing the work loads of the various county Boards of Elections and the poll workers (and since I have volunteered to be a poll worker, this has a direct effect on me) along with the possible disenfranchisement of thousands of legal voters, makes this a very bad thing in my opinion.

There is good news for people wanting to vote in Ohio. As reported in the New York Times, the Justice Department will not be pursuing any litigation before the November 4 election. They do not way what will happen after November 4 (If I were a conspiracy theorist I would worry about that.) but at least this should end the court battles for a week or so. Not that it will stop the GOP from innuendo and other attacks.

Speaking of GOP attacks, TPMMuckraker has a listing of what is going on around the country with regards to attempts to suppress or intimidate voters. I do not see any Democratic organizations trying to do any of the suppression. But the only Republican that seems to be making it easier for people to vote is Charlie Crist, the governor of Florida. He is supported by some of the state Republicans, although some of them just seem to realize that trying to fight his move would not be a very good idea politically.

The two stories that bother me the most are the ones from New Mexico and Colorado. The New Mexico story because these are new citizens, exercising their rights and getting intimidating visits because of it. Welcoming new citizens, and giving them the same rights as those born here is one of the foundations of our society. I don’t like it when that is threatened. The Colorado story bothers me because it is somewhat like what happened in Ohio in 2004. A Republican Secretary of State making decisions that constantly take away the opportunity of people to express themselves in the voting booth.

While reading over at 538.com, I followed some links to a couple of commercials for Barack Obama. The first is from the Obama website and it exemplifies most of the reason I am voting for him. It is 2 minutes of him talking about the country and what his plans are to get up back on the right track if he is elected president.

The second video is a bit more humorous. And much more painful, as it points out many of the problems with the country right now. It is from 60Frames and stars the same guys that were in the Budweiser wazzup ad. This one is not from Anheuser-Busch, which is not surprising considering where Cindy McCain gets her millions, but otherwise it is very recognizable.

The two ads are obviously not going for the same demographics, which shows the broad appeal of the Obama/Biden campaign and the narrow base of McCain/Palin.

That same broad appeal is also a danger for Obama. If he wins the election with any kind of mandate, it is imperative that he and Congress actually deliver on at least some of their promises. They will be handicapped by the ongoing economic crisis, but that is also the first place they can show leadership.

Obama winning the election will probably ease some of the current fears in the market, but who he would chose for his cabinet would be even more telling. Listening to his advisers like Buffet and Powell and picking the right Treasury Secretary, National Security Advisor, and Secretary of State, will ease all kinds of fears and nerves, all over the world. If, on the other hand he picked someone out in left field, it would probably be catastrophic.

I have faith that Obama will choose his cabinet wisely if he wins the election. He has already shown a talent for surrounding himself with able men and women and listening when they offer advice. In the complicated world we live in, that is the probably the best talent that an intelligent POTUS can have.