Sometimes it’s easy to forget how much time America’s leaders spend just farting around the House and Senate floor, talking COMPLETE NONSENSE. For example: this Indiana loon recently felt compelled to follow up on some other congressperson’s important comparison between lettuce and tobacco, while he could have been doing something really important for his state, like Twittering about how lettuce kills people. [C-SPAN]

Vulgar sex clown John Edwards is ending a three-month public silence tonight with a lecture of sorts at Indiana University. He will discuss politics for a cool $35,000, which is more than many American adults make in a year of manual labor. Then he will probably go to Iowa to get them ground ops all geared up for 2012! He’s gotta win it one of these days! [Indiana Daily Student]

Indiana. With 99% of the precincts reporting, Indiana has gone blue/black or whatever new thing we will call states. Indiana. It is 2:09 a.m., on Wednesday, and Indiana is in the tank. Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada … it’s 349-159, at the moment. It is a massive win.

Those of you who are privately in love with Chuck Todd will recall that he recently told us, “If Indiana is too close to call at poll close, that is good news for Barack Obama.” Well, Wolf Blitzer just said, “We’re in no position to make a projection yet.” MORE »

Indiana has this quaint law: Robot lie calls, or “robocalls,” are illegal. So campaigns hire whole telemarketing staffs to call people and read a bunch of incendiary bullshit to people dumb enough to answer the phone when they don’t recognize the Caller ID. There are few jobs as soul-killing as telemarketing, and people could be forgiven if they just went along with it — not like there’s any other work out there. MORE »

• Hey you teenagers with your HOPE Word Art “screen savers,” today’s the last day to register to vote in all the states in which such a thing would matter. [Matthew Yglesias]
• Jeffrey Toobin is the only person left in America with a job, and yet he would rather watch a baseball game on his laptop than pretend to think seriously about anything Sarah Palin read off an index card at the debate. [Gizmodo]
• McCain might raise a White Flag Of Defeat in Pennsylvania, which is racist. [Top of the Ticket]
• The GOP is trying to make it as difficult as possible for the three black people in Indiana — one of whom is Obama, campaigning — to vote. [TPMMuckraker]
• McCain’s Action! Comeback Plan includes highlighting Obama’s filthy terrorism fetish, something about gang-bangs/crack, and pointing out how Obama raised taxes 94 times, one time for each of his clandestine illegitimate black children with Bill Ayers. [Marc Ambinder]

NEW STATE POLLS!: From Time/CNN, conducted Sept. 14-16, in Battleground States. Florida: Obama 48, McCain 48; Indiana: McCain 51, Obama 45; North Carolina: McCain 48, Obama 47; Ohio: Obama 49, McCain 47; Wisconsin: Obama 50, McCain 47. Residents of these states should expect to see an steady influx of lawyers over the next six weeks. Lawyers! And awful lawyers at that, shipped wholesale from outer space in toxic cartons of live rats. [The Page]

Someone supposedly got a “screen shot” of some CNN article that was “taken down” before anyone could read it. The article relates in terrible, misspelled prose the curious tale of how an aide accidentally pressed the send button rather than the save button on an email announcing Barack Obama’s vice presidential pick. And then that aide put the turkey to bed and put the baby in the oven, and when she woke up a bloody hook was hanging right outside the window. The aide was then murdered for spamming 2 million Obama supporters with her crap. [Free Republic]

This is totally not change we can believe in! Some poor reporter in Indiana followed Barack Obama around all day on a bus and the Obama campaign billed his employer OVER FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS for that wonderful privilege. Some of the bill applied to transportation and supplies but over $100 was for food — which the reporter ate very little of, because who can work up an appetite for anything except man candy when Our Barry is around? MORE »

Hey gents! Have you ever been hanging out with a dude friend and gone to sleep and then woken up with your sex organ in your dude friend’s mouth? Pretty freaky, right? Well, that is exactly what happened to this one guy who was hanging out with Glenn Murphy Jr., the former head of Indiana’s Clark County Republican Party and chairman of the Young Republican National Federation. So Glenn Murphy Jr.’s victim sued him, and now he has to go to prison for two years and then register as a sex offender forever. MORE »

Cable news anchors, you are all fired, except for Chuck Todd. You freak out for weeks about all the crazy doomsday scenarios in which Hillary Clinton might be able to WREST the nomination from Captain Hope, and finally at 2 a.m. you’re like, “Oh, but the math.” This is a photograph of Hillary Clinton also thinking about math. [New York Observer]