2500 or more Sonoma County residents participated in a Join the Impact demonstration today, taking a stand against h8. As the California Supreme Court has established, marriage IS a human right.

Norm Coleman is running some desperate ads against Al Franken in Minnesota (I guess he gets nervous when his opponent is alive). Things are getting strange in Minnesota.

The Obama 30-minute spot was a brilliantly crafted film, designed to say one thing to wavering Americans: "I'm one of you, and I understand your troubles, too." All of the weeks and weeks of petty, inaccurate crapola from McCain, the smear merchantry behind the whispers and e-mails, the attempts to convince the doubters among us that "Obama is foreign" to give cover for racial prejudice as a means of urging

A glossy half-hour pre-epitaph on Campaign 2008.

Al Franken has been the target of some of the ugliest political ads of 2008, courtesy of the Republican National Senatorial Committee. This one really takes the cake. The voiceover claims that Franken "humiliates minorities", "demeans women", "writes pornography", and "laughs at the disabled," amongst other defects. Life imitates art, I guess. Here's a transcript of a Saturday Night Live sketch from the 1990s featuring Al Franken as a political analyst discussing negative ads on the fake news broadcast "Weekend Update with Norm MacDonald":

Bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley is playing in Virginia. The Obama campaign should get this on the airwaves all over Appalachia...now.  Several of you mentioned Stanley would endorse Obama, so I went looking for an ad.

Ralph Stanley sounds cuter than a speckled pup under a red wagon.  Just listen.

Now, this is more like it. Somehow, this ad manages to convey out of touch, same old crapola with enough of a hint to make McCain the person you want to laugh at. Which, incidentally, is not the candidate you want to be when running for the presidency. Just watch:1982.

Lies. Distortions. Untruths. Deceptions. Dissembling. Misstatements. Out-of-context snippets. Andrea Mitchell: "That literally is not true." John Sidney McCain III is not running an honorable campaign. It's an unpatriotic campaign. It's a dishonest campaign. It's full of untruths, distortions, and lies. He knows he can't win a campaign based on the truth, so he lies to the American people to win. Haven't we had enough lies?

If McCain thought he'd get the week all to himself while the Obamas are on vacation, he can think again: ...as Washington embraced him, John McCain hugged right back. The lobbyists – running his low road campaign. The money – billions in tax breaks for oil and drug companies, but almost nothing for families like yours....

McCain's ad tells us not just what McCain wants us to think of Obama, but what he knows is true of himself. The man of honor I and many others admired; that John McCain, is dead. With each compromise he made, with each degrading vote, with each violation of his personal honor and beliefs, he killed himself in inches before our very eyes. And as with most such degraded men, now he tries to clutch the broken shards of his honor to him, and lashes out at others, imagining that they too must have made his Faustian bargain.