Your other editor Sara wrote earlier about how every governor candidate in Virginia has taken a shine to this hilarious & false idea that prison officials closely monitor third-grade test scores to determine how many jails they’ll need for the Dumbs in 15 years. But only Terry McAuliffe went ahead and made it into an insane teevee advertisement! The final product (which your male associate editor wrote about this morning at length for his NBC racketeering gig) proved to be McAuliffe’s most twisted, hilarious failed attempt at pretending to be a real human being yet, in a life and campaign defined by such attempts. “Pre-k now or prison later!” Nice one, sociopath! [NBC Washington]

Barack Obama’s new ad is about Education. How very exciting. Education. But given the material, it’s mildly funny: the screen suddenly turns gray and a pervy image of John McCain appears and he’s just staring at the creatures and his head is inflating like a devil balloon and he hates education money and he’s like I’M GONNA FUCKING EAT YR BRAIN NOODLES, exactly. [YouTube]

America’s favorite buzzkills — the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — have launched a new advertising campaign in public schools in Tennessee that is sure to stop HOPPED-UP DRUG GUN BUNNIES from shooting their frienemies. The slogan for a series of posters reads, “Be Cool… Don’t Let Guns Rule.” Now all of Tennessee’s public school students are smoking cigarettes, which remains a vital ingredient of Being Cool. [CNS News]

Oh great, now all the schools in Maryland’s Carroll County are locked down, because some kid has threatened to shoot everybody. [Baltimore Sun]

* “At a Tuesday markup of the Taleshia Ford Memorial Amendment Act of 2007, the Committee on Public Works and the Environment voted to strike a section of the bill that would make it a crime for minors to buy alcohol at ABC-licensed establishments.” [WCP]
* Plagiarizing your way to the top isn’t so bad, comparatively. Can you think of anything to fix DC’s shitty schools? [WP]
* House advances Casino Plan recognition for Virginia Indian tribes. [WP]
* “It’s time for a revolution in this country, my friends. We set up a system whereby we’d pick a few people to make sure our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was protected from foreign invaders and immoral peer-citizens. Our ancestors wanted simply to live in peace, pursuing their own brand of happiness. We’re to the point where, to the contrary, more than anything else outside of terrorism, the government itself — the very institution we set up to protect us — poses the largest threat to our way of life. It’s getting old. If you’ve walked out to your parked car & found a ticket for expired tags, take it in to your jurisdiction and fight to get your money back.” [Big Stupid Guy]
* Bill Richardson is a hilarious cowboy. [YouTube]

• The Counterterrorism Blog keeps track of reactions to Zarqawi’s death. Proterrorism Blog strangely silent all day. [The Counterterrorism Blog]

• Shockey news on House Appropriations Chair Jerry Lewis (R-CA) and Terroristster.com. [TPM Muckraker One and Two]
• Yearly Kos attendees starting to lose us: “We, the people, are coming to power slowly and indefatigably, here in Vegas.” [Daily Kos]
• In Sen. Rick Santorum’s (R-PA) 2005 book, It Takes a Family, he talks about the “weird socialization” of public school kids. For the audio book, he grasps for poll numbers and changes the language to “strange socialization.” [Attytood]
• ABC News publishes the name and picture of the informant who ratted out Zarqawi. It’s cool that ABC’s The Blotter allows open comments, especially today when the commenters are pissed. [The Blotter]