Here’s a warm and bubbly Christmas story about a flatulent turtle. That would be a great band name.

This won’t put an end to the humans versus robots debate, but it should.

Via emailer Jon Bossard, who notes:

The argument that robotic missions are far cheaper and more effective than human missions is belied by the fact that, even with more than half a dozen robotic missions to Mars, we still don

On the Pillsbury Doughboy:

…a few weeks ago I made disparaging remarks about the Green Lantern; this was not meant to disparage his creator, who has died

OK, so the Googlebombing campaign didn’t work yet, but the Yahoo bombing seems to have. We’re number one!

The Freepers have gotten a hold of the necrobestiality story:

This guy has already sold the movie rights to his story. It’s gonna be called Brokebuck Mountain.

Tom Mabe has been at it again.

Tom Mabe has been at it again.

Tom Mabe has been at it again.

How Dems really feel about the military.

Hey, next time, do a little research?

You know, in the future, when you look up the phrase “botched joke,” there will be a picture of John Kerry.

I don’t usually do deep political analysis, particularly when it comes to getting down and dirty with demographics, but I’m fascinated by this story, and it seems particularly appropriate on Halloween:

An analysis of state-wide records by the Poughkeepsie Journal reveals that 77,000 dead people remain on election rolls in New York State, and some 2,600 may have managed to vote after they had died. The study also found that Democrats are more successful at voting after death than Republicans, by a margin of four-to-one, largely because so many dead people seem to vote in Democrat-dominated New York City.

In light of today’s holiday, on which, like Kwanzaa for blacks and Cinco de Mayo for Mexicans, this demographic is particularly celebrated, I’m going to ask the question that nobody seems to ever ask, and one that the Republicans have to be asking themselves: how have they lost that key demographic, the metabolically challenged?

Admittedly, the Dems don’t have the dead vote locked up in the same way that they do the black vote (only four to one, rather than the ten to one they traditionally get from the African American community), but that’s still a huge “fog a mirror” gap. And the implications have to be frightening for the Republicans. After all, this is the largest demographic group of all–there are many times as many dead people as there are living ones, and that’s likely to remain the case for some time to come, and probably forever, unless we develop radical life extension technologies.

So far, the GOP has been fortunate, because, whether due to apathy, or barriers thrown up at the polls, the dead don’t tend to vote at all, by and large. But perhaps, if they could not only get many of them to switch party affiliation, but also mount a huge GOTDV drive, they could actually take advantage of this huge potential voting block, and take away a traditional Democrat advantage.

So what is it about the Dems that appeals to the non-living voters?

It really is a mystery, at least at first glance. You’d think that dead people would be naturally conservative. What more static, unchangeable state can there be, after all, but the grave? And after all, it isn’t the Republicans who want to tax the dead. You’d think that these people would be voting their pocketbooks, even if the leather in them is rotting away. And yet they still continue to pull the donkey lever.

It can’t be the entitlements: they’re all at a stage of their life at which they don’t really need the Social Security and Medicare any more.

Is it abortion on demand? That wouldn’t seem to be a life-or-death issue (so to speak) for people well beyond their prime child-bearing years. And state of health.

Is it the war? The dead have little to fear from war. Their stuff’s not going to get broken, because their descendants have it now, and what they didn’t pass on, the Democrats taxed away. As for the last measure of devotion, how much worse can it get than being dead? That can’t be it.

How about gun control? Well some, perhaps even many, of the dead may be dead as a result of guns. But given all of the other frailties and diseases that come with being human, it seems unlikely that this is a significant number of them. I can’t imagine that this is what appeals to them about the gun-control party.

Support for the UN, and immigration? Well, here’s a good possibility. After all, most of the dead aren’t American citizens. Of course, the ones that aren’t, aren’t eligible to vote, either. But then, neither are dead people, so this hardly seems to be a major barrier.

You know, I think we may have it.

The key for Republicans is to really tighten up on the voting rolls, and only allow American dead to vote, and actually require, you know, IDs and stuff. Of course, we can expect the Dems to scream in outrage, about “voter intimidation,” etc., to such a policy.

You know, on second thought, maybe we should just put up a fence around graveyards.