The new banner (approx. 10 feet high, twenty or so across) hanging in the window of the Human Rights Campaign building in downtown Washington is lacking in inspiration. Addressed to George Bush, it says, “You’re Fired.” Hmmm. Also: Isn’t it a little early for such triumphal fist-pumping? I wonder what the creative minds at HRC will do if Bush wins.

Back in June, Hugh Hewitt speculated that some politicos would use blogs for dirty tricks during the course of the campaign. To run a Black Blog Op, Hewitt wrote, “Build an audience via tried and true techniques . . . and then, late in a campaign, have the blog turn on candidate X.”

Hugh Hewitt: Prophet! The group Yes, Bush Can has been bopping around for a while, running a guerilla campaign that seemed to support George W. Bush. Today, I get an email from the group announcing that “as we traveled across America campaigning for Bush, we learned more than we wanted to know about Bush’s policies. We came to see that this administration is a catastrophe for most people. As a result, we are abandoning our support of Bush and officially endorsing John Kerry for President.”

Now the “Yes Bush Can” campaign was never really pro-Bush. Sure, they said things like “President George W. Bush is ready to lead us through these difficult times, but liberals don’t believe our citizens are ready to face hard choices.” But if you kept reading, you found that they were being, like, waaay ironical.

Still, only people paying close attention would have noticed. Now that they’ve “officially” renounced Bush, I won’t be surprised if some gullible journalist bites and does a story on how this “grassroots” group is turning on the president they “supported” just five days before the election.

Perhaps. My election predictions are up now. Before anyone emails telling me I’m crazy and in the tank for Bush, let me say (1) I may be crazy; (2) I certainly might be wrong; (3) Whatever the case, this isn’t wishful thinking on my part.

For the four of you out there who pay attention to TV writers, Jane Espenson is the real deal. She’s one of the four or five superstar writers to emerge from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and she is finally getting her own pilot on Fox. Let us hope that Fox shows better judgment with this than they did earlier this year with Tim Minear’s Wonderfalls.

For those of you who don’t pay attention to TV writers and want to know what’s so great about Jane Espenson, see this interview, where she displays much talent, wit, and charm. Sample:

Question: How big a Star Trek geek are you?

JE: Only medium sized. I loved original Trek and TNG, and watched the early years of DS9, but then I kinda stopped. Here’s a measure: I know who wrote THE TROUBLE WITH TRIBBLES. I know who invented the warp drive. I own a copy of Brent Spiner’s album. I think I remember Spock’s mothers maiden name. But I don’t know who played Tom Paris. I don’t know what the nacelles do. I don’t know the name of the episode where Kirk switched bodies with the woman and spent the episode swanning about and getting hysterical.

Wrote my election prediction for the Standard. Here are my Electoral College totals: Bush 271 to Kerry 267

Of course, it would take only a medium-sized news story over the weekend to cause an electoral landslide. A shift in voter sentiment worth less than 5 points could allow either candidate to take off like a struggling kite that finally catches some wind.

However, I’m calling this small win for Bush in the belief that no new vote-killing stories—like Bush’s DUI or anything from the Kerry Vietnam and/or antiwar files—are left to break. My operating assumptions buck only the conventional wisdom that late undecided voters break for the challenger.

In my electoral tally, I award Pennsylvania and Ohio to Kerry, the latter because he has more intensity there—more campaign and candidate presence and more voter-registration workers. Michigan, too, goes for the senator. When I was in Detroit a few weeks ago, the local radio station was running a contest in which, instead of direct cash prizes, winning callers would see their worst household bill paid off by the radio station. To me, that says “Democratic territory.” Also, the Dems’ get-out-vote efforts in Michigan in 2000 were impressive and made all the difference. Kerry’s pander on the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste controversy in Nevada, I am guessing, will work. And Minnesota, where the polls seem to favor Kerry, seems ripe for an anti-Bush vote.

Inversely, I believe the hype about Bush taking Florida. Where security issues and terror get big play, I think Bush enjoys an advantage and I’m heartened by the importance the good citizens of Florida have attached to the issue of Sami Al-Arian.

So, Kerry gets Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Michigan, New Hampshire, Oregon, Maine, Minnesota, Ohio. Bush gets Florida, Indiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, Nevada, West Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. I think I’ve counted correctly, though my sloppy notes make me wonder. The margin of error might in my own bad handwriting.

I didn’t get a chance to flag Peter Beinart’s very good Washington Post column yesterday about the disappearance of the Jewish vote. It’s worth a read. (One quibble: Beinart throws an elbow at Ariel Sharon’s “hard-line policies”–isn’t Sharon the guy bucking his entire hard-line base to advocate withdrawal from the territories? He deserves some credit for this.)

Beinart’s piece dovetails nicely with Jody Bottum’s sensational essay on The Myth of the Catholic Voter. Jody argues, quite convincingly, that as a political demographic group Catholic voters no longer exist.

Towards the end of the piece, Jody touches on the importance of the “Catholic vocabulary” in politics and how the inclusion of this vocabularly in the cultural lexicon is what gives the illusion of Catholics being a political power.

I really can’t say enough about Jody Bottum as a writer, and this long, fascinating piece is worth your time.

The front-page story in today’s Washington Times about Russian involvement in the taking of weapons from al-Qaqaa could prove a real setback for the Kerry campaign–that is, if it is going to be covered elsewhere at all. For while the Times is running this story by Bill Gertz (and also linked by Drudge), CNN/Netscape News is running this headline instead: “Rebels: US Intel Helped Remove Missing Weapons.”

So do we report what the Pentagon is saying or what the insurgents are saying? For some, this is a very tough call.

The Washington Post has an editorial putting the “missing explosives” story in perspective. I’m sure the New York Times will follow suit tomorrow.