Pun Salad

With two days before the election, it's time to assemble our final results. They are unsurprising:

Phoniness has been rife this week:

• Sarah Palin weighed in at Fox about President Obama's visit to post-Sandy New Jersey:
  According to Palin, Obama used the trip to the storm-torn state as a phony show of bipartisanship.

  "Well, it is quite a shame that, you know, Obama got what he wanted out of that, and that was the photo ops with a Republican governor so that he and the mainstream media could kind of fake that bipartisanship that in no way, shape or form does President Obama represent. He is the most partisan president I think that we have ever had. So he got his photo ops out of that, unfortunately, because then he got to jet off and you know, here he goes again -- party in Vegas with Jay-Z."

• But Democrats are no less likely to detect inauthenticity in their rival. Ex-governor Ted Strickland was unimpressed with Mitt Romney's charitable efforts.
  Democrat Ohio Governor and top Obama surrogate Ted Strickland just said Romney can't even "fake compassion" and made fun of Romney's food drive for Sandy victims.

• I don't spend any time at World Net Daily, but their efforts to publicize the Obama campaign's unwillingness to check the possible illegality of their donors is funny:
  Using a Pakistani Internet Protocol and proxy server, a disposable credit card and a fake address, "Osama bin Laden" has successfully donated twice to Barack Obama's presidential re-election campaign.

  The "Bin Laden" donations, actually made by WND staff, included a listed occupation of "deceased terror chief" and a stated employer of "al-Qaida."

  My cynical take: since campaign finance laws are written by politicians, my guess would be that when "illegal foreign contributions" occur, the penalties are mostly or entirely aimed at the contributor, and the politicians simply have to say "oops" and give the money back, perhaps pay a token fine. Anyone know for sure? (Certainly the story of Norman Hsu tends to confirm this.)

• An AP Story details some last-minute underhanded campaign tactics.
  People in Florida, Virginia and Indiana have gotten calls falsely telling them they can vote early by phone and don't need to go to a polling place. In suburban Broward County, Fla., a handful of elderly voters who requested absentee ballots say they were visited by unknown people claiming to be authorized to collect the ballots.

  So don't fall for any of that. The same story also describes the mass-mailing of a DVD documentary alleging that Barack Obama's real father is not the guy from Kenya we've all heard about, but Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist who lived in Hawaii at the right time.

  I take it the actual evidence for that being true is low. Although it would take the air out of birther sails.

• But did that make you think "break out the DNA test kits"? Unfortunately, the Presidential DNA is considered to be top secret. Why? Because with access to that information, someone could design and target a deadly bioweapon. As reported in the Atlantic:
  […], consider that the DNA of world leaders is already a subject of intrigue. According to Ronald Kessler, the author of the 2009 book In the President's Secret Service, Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched--they are later sanitized or destroyed--in an effort to keep would-be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material. (The Secret Service would neither confirm nor deny this practice, nor would it comment on any other aspect of this article.) And according to a 2010 release of secret cables by WikiLeaks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directed our embassies to surreptitiously collect DNA samples from foreign heads of state and senior United Nations officials. Clearly, the U.S. sees strategic advantage in knowing the specific biology of world leaders; it would be surprising if other nations didn't feel the same.

  Suddenly, guns and bombs seem so brutish and old fashioned!

So that's it! Assuming we're still around, we'll pick things up again in 2015.