Yesterday, Red Sox pitching ace and playoff hero Curt Schilling backed out of appearing at a campaign event for George Bush, and in effect apologized for publicly endorsing him. Schilling was quoted in a post on a Red Sox fan website that "(w)hile I hope to see (Bush) re-elected, it's not my place, nor the time for me to offer up my political opinions unsolicited."

Huh? If the final four days of a Presidential campaign isn't the right time to offer up your political opinions, when is? To suggest that Democratic citizens of RedSoxNation are somehow going to feel betrayed because one of their heroes is a Republican is ridiculous. Lefty sports fans long ago came to terms that many of our heroes on the field and in the arena are, shall we say, politically disagreeable. White athletes are a more dependable Republican vote (that is, when they actually care enough to register to vote) than Evangelical Christians, so Schilling's endorsement of Bush (and dissing of Kerry) isn't going to break anyone's heart. He should have stood by the courage of his convictions.

FWIW, by winning on Wednesday, teams from Boston (and its immediate surroundings) have now beaten teams from St. Louis in the championships of all four major American sports. I'm still checking, but I don't think any other city has beaten another city for three different sports titles.

The big problem with trying to prognosticate who benefits by the reappearance today of Osama bin Laden is that the election isn't going to be held tomorrow; it takes place Tuesday. No matter what reaction people are having right now to seeing his ugly mug pop up again, that same feeling ain't gonna last four days. The reality is that OBL is still alive (and seemingly healthy), he's still a threat, and Bush hasn't caught him yet. Any benefit he might provide the President's reelection dissipates every second he remains at large.

UPDATE: Upon further examination, the oft-cited parallels between this election and 1980 are again brought into focus. That year, an unpopular incumbent President had a slight lead in the polls going into the last weekend of the campaign, but also faced an increasingly bleak picture in the Electoral College. The challenger had the momentum following a clear-cut victory in their one debate, but had by no means wrapped up the election. In that final weekend, a deal to release the hostages in Teheran was seemingly in the works, and the public was led to believe that it would be announced shortly.

It turns out that the mullahs were yanking our chain, again, and the negotiations fell through. No one could fairly blame President Carter for that, or for the kidnapping of the hostages in the first place. But being reminded of what had come to symbolize that president's shortcomings on the eve of the election was enough to turn what had been a neck-and-neck battle into a blow-out.

For those of you obsessed with Electoral College calculations, you ought to make Frogblog your first destination.

Best way to tell that Kerry is going to win on Tuesday: not the fact that he's pulled even in the polls, with the remaining undecided voters likely to break his way, or that the market-based predictors show him pulling even or ahead, or even the high turnout figures in Dade County among non-Cuban Latino voters. It's today's column by Dick Morris, predicting a Bush victory.

LYING PONDSCUM !!!!!!

Quickie Trivia: Name the living members of the Baseball Hall of Fame that were alive the last time the Red Sox won a World Series. Winner gets a night of free drinks and my good company. BTW, there are, at last count, seventeen deceased members whose entire lives were spent after the 1918 Series.

Availing myself of the early-voting program the County of Los Angeles offers, I performed my civic duty yesterday. After a great deal of soul-searching and internal debate, I finally decided to cast my ballot for the challenger, John Kerry. It was a tough decision. I could either choose a candidate who promised to restore some measure of fiscal sanity to Washington, to renew our nation's commitment to the environment, to pursue more civilized policies in areas like gay rights, and to finally take the fight to the terrorists. Or I could vote based on my material interests, in favor of a candidate who would keep my taxes low, in the off-chance that I ever marry into money, and who, like his father before him, has always pursued policies guaranteed to give people in my line of work, bankruptcy law, a steady income. In the end, competence and security won out over tax cuts and future clients.

On the one hand, you have the Bush Campaign trying to come up with a tidy explanation as to why over 300 tons of explosive just got up and walked out of an Iraqi storage facility about the time of The Liberation: either it disappeared when we weren't looking, or it was already gone by the time we got there, but we didn't notice. On the other, you have the righteous outrage of some junior orwells at a claim by John Kerry that he was at the Sixth Game of the 1986 World Series, when there is a press report indicating that he attended a political dinner in South Boston the same night. I shouldn't have to waste my time on this, but Logan Airport in Boston is less than three miles away from where the dinner was held, and JFK LaGuardia is literally on the doorstep of Shea Stadium. A flight between the two cities takes only an hour, so it's not as if Kerry would have needed to charter the Concorde to be at both events the same night. Game Six went extra innings; four hours elapsed between Bob Ojeda's first pitch to Wade Boggs and Mookie Wilson's dribbler through the legs of Bill Buckner. Kerry had plenty of time to shake hands at the dinner, put in a token appearance, then head off to New York to have his heart broken by the Mets.

The Spice Boys: One big difference between Band Aid and Band Aid 3 is that the original featured British performers who hadn't been thoroughly rejected by stateside music fans. I guess if it's for a good cause, we're supposed to pretend Liam Gallagher and Chris Martin are important rock icons....

As a result of last night's game, this post has now been retracted by its author.

Jacques Derrida "dies": The Onion has its pre-election review of the swing states.

George Soros also rigged my fantasy baseball league.

Karl Rove has a reputation for being a genius, perhaps undeservedly, considering the late collapse his candidate had in the 2000 election. If he's going to earn that rep this time around, it could well depend on how well he's can make gay marriage a wedge issue again, after the week we've just spent discussing the sexual preference of the Vice President's daughter. The controversy clearly played to the short term benefit of the President; after being swept in the debates by John Kerry, and seeming to be less "presidential" than his opponent in the polls taken in the aftermath, it may have been a necessary diversion to change the topic to the propriety of that subject being raised by the Democrats in the first place, and (especially) the rather clumsy and stilted way Senator Kerry brought the subject up. Bush has moved into a slight lead again, and for the time being the momentum the Kerry Campaign had generated since the end of September has stalled.

All of that is fine and dandy, but as far as a winning strategy for November is concerned, it's not going to mean squat. After all, we're talking about the modern-day Republican Party. To Karl Rove, George Bush, et al., gay-bashing isn't a bug, it's a feature. For a campaign that was relying on the "Three G's" (God, gays, and guns) to turn out its base, and that had made rather unsubtle references to its opponent being "French-looking", to now be forced to adopt a defensive posture over this issue can't be what anyone planned.

Let's remember how this all came about in the first place. George Bush was asked, during the third debate, whether he thought homosexuality was a lifestyle "choice". The correct answer is the one that the scientific community has come to, as well as (at least in his public actions) the Vice President: No. John Kerry used his response to point out that fact, that the Cheneys have a daughter whom they are proud of, who has a prominent position in his campaign, who has a partner considered to be enough a part of their family that she came on stage after the Vice Presidential Debate, and who is openly gay. If the Cheneys ever attempted to deprogram their daughter from her lifestyle decisions, the public record is silent.

But to answer that question in the negative would be disastrous before his religious conservative base, which is overwhelmingly homophobic. Answering "I don't know", when his Administration's actions contradict the public behavior of his Vice President, is a lawyerly way of evading any truthful answer. It is the sort of answer a tobacco executive might give if he was asked whether his product causes lung cancer, or a fascist historian might use if asked whether there were any Jews gassed at Auschwitz. After all, there's always some doubt; who can tell, with absolute, 100% certainty, what is true and what is false. If the President was to be asked whether he believes that the Theory of Evolution is a more accurate description of the origin of mankind than the Book of Genesis, does anyone doubt what his answer would be?

Kerry's response, while clearly hurting him in the short run, puts the Bush Campaign in a bind for the final two weeks. Any attempt to press the issue of gay marriage among swing voters is going to bring back the discussion to the sexual preference of Mary Cheney, whose privacy (and, it goes without saying, her right to be gay) the campaign has strived to defend the past few days. I don't see how Karl Rove gets around that.

Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan has had the best takes on the most stunning revelation from the third debate: that the Vice President has a gay daughter. In particular, he notes (or one of his e-mailers notes) that the battlelines on this issue seem to be generationally-based: with varying degrees of sincerity, fogies seem to be most offended, while those of us born after 1960 (including, it should be pointed out, Mary Cheney, who has refused to bash Kerry over this issue, even though she is running her father's campaign) don't think it matters at all. Sullivan, who has broken with the Bush Administration on, among other things, their efforts to limit civil rights for homosexuals, has deftly exposed the hypocrisy of those on the right concerning this issue (as well, it should be noted, the hypocrisy of those who pay lip service to supporting gay rights, but who act with shocked revulsion when the topic is discussed during a Presidential debate).

Model Ballgirls: I was always under the impression that tennis was more exciting to watch in person than on TV. So why use this rather cheesy gimmick? Not that I'm objecting....

A few people have noted their discomfort with the reference by the Democratic candidates, first in the Veep Debate and again last night, to the fact that the daughter of Vice President Cheney is openly gay. One of the commentators on FoxNews last night went so far as to claim that the mere mention of that fact by John Kerry was the low point in the debate, while Mickey Kaus asked "What if Kerry were debating a conservative on affirmative action, and that conservative had a black wife, and Kerry gratuitously brought that up in an attempt to cost his opponent the racist vote?"

Well, let's try a little thought experiment. The equivalent time in the struggle for equality with African Americans would have been 1962, when the momentum was clearly moving in the direction of the supporters of civil rights, but a large and seemingly impregnable section of the country was resistent, and seemed to have the political power to thwart progress in that area. Imagine a gubernatorial race in Tennessee, or Missouri, or some other border state, between a candidate with "moderate" views on civil rights for that time (ie., dismantling much of Jim Crow, supporting a ban on lynching, greater voting rights), and a candidate with, shall we say, views more in line with the Confederacy, who claimed that his opposition to civil rights came not because he was a racist, but because he opposed the "intrusion" of the federal government into local matters.

Let's also say that the Dixiecrat had a daughter, who had attended college up north, become a lawyer, joined her father's campaign staff, and, incidentally, was married to a black man. Would it be inappropriate for the moderate candidate to mention that fact during the campaign, in the context of calling for a more free and open society, especially if the Dixiecrat was running on a platform that included support for anti-miscegenation laws? Of course not; one of the reasons the walls of bigotry inevitably fall is that they ultimately reach us at where we are most vulnerable, in our backyards and with our families. Does it make Dick Cheney, and the rest of us, uncomfortable? Of course; it should.

It really is no different than asking Michael Dukakis in 1988 how he would feel about the death penalty if it was his wife who was the victim. If conservatives really do have a non-homophobic reason for supporting the Defense of Marriage Act, then dealing with the fact that people they know and care about are affected by their stance is obligatory.

John Gill Watch: It turns out the Phillies-great-turned-U.S. Senator has every reason to go cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs. Today, he accused his opponent's campaign staffers of having beat up his wife at a picnic this past summer, in full view of the public and press, which, oddly enough, hadn't seen fit to report on the matter. In fact, considering the grievous assault, it does seem odd that Senator Bunning did not go public with the incident until today, when he was forced to explain why he had used a teleprompter to deliver his lines in a debate (mentioned below), in clear violation of the rules.

Well, I didn't go out drinking after all. My sister was held up at work, so I babysat my nephew, and thereby got stuck watching the debate (and a good live summary can be found at Prof. Johnson's site, here). Bush finally came up with a persona that didn't alienate the audience, and stuck with it, but his miniscule record of domestic accomplishments put him pretty much on the defensive anyways, so he benefitted little. His lib'rul-lib'rul-lib'rul attack line grew tiresome after awhile, and he just doesn't have the gravity to make that a compelling indictment of his opponent. And I'm sure the media "truth squads" will have a field day with him falsely denying that he had said he wasn't that concerned about Osama anymore.

Kerry was Kerry, knowledgeable and aggressive, but without the ability of a Clinton to land bruising shots at his opponent, or to turn uncomfortable issues on their head. He has no common touch whatsoever, as his discomfort when he made the Tony Soprano reference showed. But after an opening half hour that was dominated by religion and social issues, where Bush did well, the debate settled into a pattern similar to the previous ones, in which Kerry gradually took command. The first instapoll, by ABC, gave Kerry a narrow win, in spite of again showing that more Republicans than Democrats tuned in. Like the second debate, which appeared on its surface to be even until it became evident that Kerry had done the more effective job impressing the voters in the middle, I suspect that his good political fortune over the last two weeks will continue.

For the first time, Kerry now leads the WaPo/ABC tracking poll, having gained seven points on the President in two days. Gallup also reported a couple of days ago that Kerry had moved into a slight lead. Both polls continue to make the assumption that more Republicans will turn out this year than Democrats, so the momentum evidenced here is clearly advantageous for the challenger.