What to do now - trust me.

For the next couple of days, here's what to do:

Rake leaves. You do not have to distinguish registered leaves from likely leaves.

Go Trick or Treating with your kids or some neighborhood kids. You don't have to try and figure out what impact your daughter's costume will have on swing voters in Florida.

Grade papers. If you aren't a professor or teacher, just grab some random pieces of paper and mark those up. It passes the time.

Call your parents/kids/grandparents. Everyone loves to talk to their family, sometimes, and few people do it enough.

Cheer for Green Bay on Sunday. Nothing to do with the election, but doesn't everyone love the Pack?

Here's what not to do:

Obsess over polls.

Check YahooNews or Google News or Bloglines every 3 minutes to see if anything earth shattering has happened.

Bore anyone with yet another rendition of "Bush is incompetent (bin Laden Remix)" or "Kerry will surrender to Osama and force us all into gay marriages (with the Danielle Pletka disco beat)".

Read the other side's blogs and fall into a pit of despair that (your candidate) is suddenly trailing in the polls/made a horrible gaffe/is failing to generate enthusiasm among (swing voter bloc of your choice).

Believe that anyone, including yourself, knows what is going to happen.

Have a nice weekend, folks.

UPDATE: aaaargh!! A top Bush strategist has been quoted as saying that bin Laden's tape is a "gift." Bin Laden's being free to threaten Americans is a "gift" to Bush's campaign. So that's how it is. It's actually kind of... refreshing.

Sorry everyone.. I take it all back. Ignore all the above advice, and get back to work. Full speed ahead, all hands to deck - no rest for the weary, and all that.

Comments

[John Steven]

"Cheer for Green Bay on Sunday. Nothing to do with the election..."

Actually, it might. In the previous 15 presidential elections (since 1936), if the Redskins win their last home game before the election, the party that occupies the White House continues to hold it; if the Redskins lose that last home game, the challenging party's candidate unseats the incumbent president. And tomorrow's game is in Washington against the Packers, so...

http://www.snopes.com/sports/football/election.asp
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2004/football/nfl/10/28/bc.fbn.redskins.politic.ap/

[Rodger]

Abu, have you seen the MEMRI claim that bin Laden threatened to attack only red states?

That's the spin on the other side's blogs anyway (from Volokh on down):

http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SA1404

Can you settle the translation issue?

Thanks!

[the aardvark]

Well, I'll have to go and check the transcript, which I might or might not have time to do today bc of teaching obligations, but it seems that bin Laden's reference to "Sweden" makes the interpretation that he meant only "U.S. states" pretty unlikely.

But just on general principles... MEMRI is not a non-partisan source from which "the other side" can drawn evidence.. it IS the other side, completely partisan and unreliable. It would be like a Kerry supporter quoting MoveOn for evidence about Bush's policies.