It's Primary Day in Pennsylvania, that long anticipated Democratic political apocalypse. Obama's got chalk slogans at the college, while Ron Paul activists have papered College Hill with signs. We got three phone calls from the Democrats yesterday reminding us to vote, and our house has been hit by both Obama and Clinton volunteers, neither of whom stayed to talk, instead choosing to slip fliers into our door. I blame the dogs, though they never scared off the Mormon missionaries...

As for me ... being the independent minded guy I am (and registered Libertarian to boot) I don't get to vote in either primary, so I'll just sit back and watch the spectacle.

So it seems like the federal government's going to go ahead and cut everyone in America a check, which is nice and all except for a) it will likely do little to stop a recession, seeing as how it's a tiny sliver of GNP and b) we'll have to pay for it later since there aren't any spending cuts elsewhere to balance the expenditure. We're basically borrowing (stealing if you're of a more cynical mind) from our future selves to pay our present selves.

If you really want to help the economy and benefit Americans in both the short term and long term, then you'd deal with the very real, very expensive issue of Social Security and Medicare entitlements.

But why solve a problem today that you can panic about tomorrow?

Atlas Games President John Nephew's been elected to city council in Maplewood, Minnesota. According to Gaming Report, his opposition tried to play the "games are evil" card, but clearly it didn't work. I'm not saying I want to run for city council in Easton, I'm just saying I find it interesting that a gamer was able to do it ... and win.

Nephew talks about his win and the mainstreaming of games at ICv2.

I'm sure this seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time. While the naturally animal-loving freak brigade will undoubtedly be out in force over this, this strikes me as one of those things that any of our dads would have done, given similar logistical challenges.

Ok, maybe just my dad. But then again, that's probably why I find the Vacation movies so damn amusing.

While I'm sure some are chagrined by Hugo Chavez's nationalization of Venezuelan oil, I for one welcome our new leftist overlords. After all, nationalization only hastens the day when his regime collapses under its own statist weight, making way for a better capitalist tomorrow.

Reason.com offers a lengthy interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park. In it they discuss the series' satire of the left and the right, and their life long quest for nonconformity. Particularly interesting is the discussion of Comedy Central's maneuverings regarding depictions of Muhammad and Scientology.

This quote from Matt Stone sums things up nicely:

I had Birkenstocks in high school. I was that guy. And I was sure that those people on the other side of the political spectrum were trying to control my life.

Reason recently redesigned their web site, making it smoother, easier on the eyes, and more modern looking. They've also added a new podcast category, and posted their first entry to it: "Scott McConnell and Daniel McCarthy: The American Conservative's editors on the big Democratic win". I'll be interested to see how this evolves -- I'd love to see a regular Reason podcast, but I'd be happy with occasional interviews like this one.

I wasn't thrilled with the electronic voting machines that were rolled out across the Lehigh Valley for today's voting -- the lack of a paper trail continues to bother me greatly. But I wasn't as upset as a man from Allentown, Pa., allegedly was as Engadget reports:

The highlight of the day, though, has nothing to do with shoddy equipment and everything to do with a crazy voter who attacked a Diebold-brand machine in Allentown, Pennsylvania. [The forty-three-year-old] a registered independent, apparently believed that the e-voting machines had been deployed in a wild conspiracy by Republicans, and decided to make a statement by smashing the $5,000 device with a metal cat paperweight.

They may not win anything else, but Libertarian candidates earned top web standard and accessibility honors from CNET in their recent poll of 1,000 political web sites.

Of approximately 1,000 campaign Web sites surveyed two weeks before the Nov. 7 election, only 35 passed the validation tests created by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. Seven of those were created by Libertarian candidates, some of whom have degrees in computer or electrical engineering or count themselves as free-software aficionados. (Republicans came in a close second.)

Ok, that wasn't the real headline, but it should be, since "Poll: Most feel civil liberties not harmed by war on terror" really doesn't do enough to drive home the point. The poll says 39 percent feel the government has gone too far in restricting civil liberties (which is a nice block of potential votes) but "34 percent said they believe the administration has been about right on the restrictions" and most frustratingly, 25% of the sheeple surveyed responded that "the administration has not gone far enough."