Oh, Rick Santorum. We're so going to enjoy your all-too-brief sojourn as a serious presidential candidate.

RICK SANTORUM: I DIDN'T SAY BLACK PEOPLE, I SAID BLAH PEOPLE. Did Santorum really equate black folks with welfare recipients? No, no no no. You must have misunderstood. Rick Santorum would never do that. Certainly not in front of a bunch of cameras during a town hall full of white folks in Iowa, a state where less than 10 percent of welfare recipients are black.

I realized soon into today's Manchester Town Hall why John McCain had to endorse Mitt Romney. It never dawned on me before, but it seems that the senator from Arizona's wife shares a blonde helmet with Callista Gingrich. If forced to appear next to each other, one would have to wear a yellow mop bucket.

In the 19 months since the 2008 election, our nation's political landscape has taken quite the dramatic turn. The Democrats have succumbed to a Wall Street-like plunge in popularity. And in a bizarro-world scenario, health care has morphed Obama into a grossly polarizing figure, while Sarah Palin has birthed a "Yes We Can"-style underdog attack of her own -- successfully stirring the pot during her recent Tea Party appearance in our very own Common

For just the second time since change came to America, the respective leaders of the Obama and McCain campaigns sat down at the same table -- last week, at the Harvard University Institute for Politics -- to set the record straight about what went wrong, what went right, and what happened behind the scenes during Campaign 2008.

Portland Phoenix managing editor Jeff Inglis will be on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation program this afternoon from 2:40 to 3 pm, talking about the importance of voting and taking calls from listeners.

Inspired by a piece I wrote about "RickeyPAC" (see "Who's Your Rickey?", October 17), and based on the effort of a group of friends of mine to convince another friend to vote, NPR is including our effort in their coverage of the run-up to the presidential election.

I applaud Boston’s young conservatives. Thanks to a gentlemanly invitation from Rich Wheeler at the Massachusetts Federation of Young Republicans, I watched this past night’s debate with a herd of Alex P. Keatons at The Place outside Faneuil Hall. And while I expected to find a rowdy bunch of politically intolerant yuppies, they weren’t rowdy whatsoever.

With Sarah Palin constantly setting up tug and blow job jokes with lines about removing gloves and applying lipstick, only one diversion can lasso my comic attention: John McCain’s age. I wasn’t going to exploit for political purposes Barack Obama’s opponent’s senility and malfeasance, but, after last night’s debate, I’m compelled to graduate from sexism to ageism.

There’s an important use for the Obama campaign’s text-message database that’s not being discussed, and it’s a way to help prevent the Republicans from stealing the election.

We know that Barack Obama’s campaign has done a much better job at getting people’s cell-phone numbers, from his various text-message initiatives (including the contest at the DNC to see which state would send in the most text messages).

What with John McCain suspending his campaign and all, it’s a good time to explore what his campaign is really thinking. Let’s do that through the lens of the letters his campaign and the Republican National Committee sent out last week, begging for money. In the process, he and the RNC demonstrated how thin their grasp is on reality, truth, and integrity.

It seems like Democrats these days love few things more than accusing Senator McCain and his supporters of being racists. Not necessarily cross-burning, hood sporting Bible belt bigots, but rather the type of out-of-touch crackers who prefer not sharing golf courses and neighborhoods with minorities.

So when the Wall Street Journal printed yesterday that former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele – a black man – was playing Barack Obama in McCain’s preparatory debates, lefty bloggers jumped on it like a Google-sponsored convention buffet.

Even the hacks at Fox News got the bulletin after last night's victory speeches: John McCain can stoop to stealing Barack's stump taglines, but nobody -- American hero or no -- wants to follow Obama. Yes, Hillary is losing the ground game . . . hard. But, as you can see above, what we're really all agog about is MSNBC enabling embeds on their news video.

On the off chance you're one of the three people who hasn't seen the original, the above will be much funnier after you watch this.

One thing we're gonna miss about the Hollywood writers' strike: dudes are gonna have less time on their hands for stuff like this. We only wish Mitt had dropped out a week later, if only so we coulda heard Fred Armisen warble "I saw my dad march with MLK."