![Ohio Honors Student attempts suicide by handgun in high school classroom. “According to a 911 call, students were running through the halls screaming after the shooting,” Fox 19 reports. How the student smuggled the gun into class remains unknown… But yay for guns, huh? Out there, keeping everybody safe. Yup. Yay for America’s piles and piles of fucking guns. [photo by kcdsTM]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/76e36942d1f7700af019efe77b9a6e74/tumblr_mm1a12Ys1m1qfengno1_1280.jpg)
Ohio Honors Student attempts suicide by handgun in high school classroom.
“According to a 911 call, students were running through the halls screaming after the shooting,” Fox 19 reports.
How the student smuggled the gun into class remains unknown… But yay for guns, huh? Out there, keeping everybody safe. Yup. Yay for America’s piles and piles of fucking guns.
![OH republicans won’t join in vote-rigging scheme, ending dreams of GOP coup. [image source]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/07468d5dd7d1b431f7e5b3a95fd91f51/tumblr_mhen3fVHS41qfengno1_1280.jpg)
Not the most persuasive pitch ever.
In the final days of the campaign in Ohio, the stops have been pulled out in the scramble to eke out a win. And that means one super PAC calling on African Americans to vote against President Obama because Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.
Cable viewers in several markets across the state are being treated to ads by an obscure self-described “alternative conservative” super PAC called the Empower Citizens Network. One of the group’s ads accuses Obama and Democrats of imploding the economy by forcing mortgage companies to lend to “unqualified borrowers” while the Soviet national anthem plays. Another promises welfare recipients that “Republicans can save your money source” by reducing regulations on business.
And then there’s the ad which one viewer told TPM is airing in the Columbus area on cable. Our source caught it a couple of times on MSNBC. That ad is the Empower Citizens Network spot that tells African Americans it’s a “lie” that Democrats support them and cites the Emancipation Proclamation as evidence.
OK, so a Republican president freed the slaves 149 years ago — and that’s the last time anyone can think of a Republican doing anything for African-Americans… So vote GOP!
Will that actually convince anyone?
In Ohio, early returns will reflect absentee vote.
Workers have started the long process of opening the thousands of absentee ballots that have flowed in for this month’s election.
Franklin County Board of Elections employees, some of them seasonal, are allowed to start opening the absentee ballots 10 days before Election Day. The envelopes containing the ballots are opened facedown so that workers don’t know the name of the voter. The ballots then must be fed into optical scanners that read the darkened ovals next to candidates’ names and other ballot items.
“We’ll keep doing that until Election Day, and when the polls close at 7:30, we’ll then total,” said Ben Piscitelli, spokesman for the board of elections.
“We won’t have a total until then. They are the first votes you see reported on election night.”
Looking at the early returns may not give an iron-clad picture of who the winner in that state will be, but it will give a very clear indication of who had the better ground game in getting early voters out. According to Reuters, “The Ohio Secretary of State’s office said that as of Oct. 26, about 1.26 million voters had cast ballots by mail-in absentee ballots or through early in-person voting. That represents about 22 percent of the number of people who voted in the 2008 presidential election.”
That’s nearly one quarter of all ballots. If there’s a decisive edge there, it could make all the difference later on in the night.
Suddenly, Romney seems worried about Florida.
CNN:
A television ad from Mitt Romney’s campaign airing in Miami pegs President Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, notorious dictators widely reviled among Cuban Americans.
The ad spotlights endorsements from Chavez and Raul Castro’s daughter Mariela, who both said they would vote for Obama if they could. According to ad-tracker CMAG, the spot aired Tuesday.
“Who supports Barack Obama?” a narrator asks in Spanish before clips of the two endorsements run.
When it comes to the embarrassing endorsement game, Mitt’s clearly the winner by a country mile — by virtue of actively seeking the endorsement of a white supremacist. Romney’s accusing Obama of guilt by association, for getting “endorsements” he never sought. Meanwhile, Mitt’s trying to get known racists to back him. This isn’t a contest that Romney should be eager to have.
But what does this say about Romney’s confidence in Florida. At a time when he’s supposedly “expanding the map” by running token ads in states he can’t possibly win, here he is shoring up what — until recently — looked like a fairly safe bet for him. That doesn’t signal good news for Romney. Ohio is the clincher right now, but it only has 18 electoral college votes. Florida has 29. Without Florida, it’s game over for Romney.
Romney’s new ad is so misleading that panicked Chrysler workers are calling to make sure they still have a job
