It turns out that, when embalming a body, the worst part comes last. Though a body’s veins may be overflowing with formaldehyde, decay—or purge—can still occur if the internal organs aren’t drained of fluid. The process for removing that fluid makes everything we’d done up to now seem like a warm bubble bath.

“This,” Carla said, brandishing a two-foot long metal tube attached to a plastic hose, “is a trocar.”

She pushed the pointed end of the trocar slightly above and to the left of his belly button and began prodding.

“This hose is attached to a hydroaspirator. We’re sucking fluids out of his internal organs. Right now I’m draining his kidney—no, wait,” she gave a little push with the trocar, “his spleen. After I get fluid out, I’m going to reverse the pressure and put chemicals inside. Do you want to give it a try?”

I nervously took the wand. Liquid was being sucked into the tube and down the drain, so I started feeling around, trying to figure out where more excess fluid might be lurking. Suddenly I hit bone—and also my threshold for mortuary work.

The bottom line:

As we were cleaning up, Carla and I chatted about the nature of the business. “I guess funeral directors are working with dangerous chemicals all day, but for some reason they typically live really long lives.”

She added that she definitely planned to be cremated.

Me too.

"I would also pray, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their god — whether it's Hindu, Buddha, Allah — that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons," [Pastor] Conrad said.

"And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they're going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and Election Day,"

And I imagined Christianism? (Hat tip: Ambers. Quote expanded and updated via AP.)

Dan Savage is running a special:

The six biggest Savage Love donors to either www.noonprop8.com or www.sayno2.com will see their letters in print, and everyone who makes a donation of at least $25 to either group—send me your donation confirmation e-mail along with your question—gets a personal reply from yours truly. The cutoff date for eligible letters is October 16.

Can I second Dan and simply beg those of you who can to donate?

“I want to acknowledge that Senator McCain tried to tone down the rhetoric in his town hall meeting yesterday,” Mr. Obama said, speaking at an early-morning rally in North Philadelphia. “I appreciated his reminder that we can disagree while still being respectful of each other. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – Senator McCain has served this country with honor, and he deserves our thanks for that.”

As I watched last week, as McCain constructed yet another a massive effort to detonate Obama, I couldn't help but think of this again. It sums up the entire fall campaign in a way:

Ms. Palin presented a litany of votes made by Mr. Obama that she described as “his unconditional support for unlimited abortions,” eliciting loud applause from a crowd gathered in a gymnasium-like building near this city’s small downtown. (A sports scoreboard hung from the center of the ceiling.) “Most troubling,” she said, “Barack Obama wouldn’t even stand up for the rights of infants born alive during an abortion.”

The slight dial-back on the "traitor and terrorist" line of attack is because it was hurting her more than Obama.

The torture techniques deployed against anyone George W. Bush unilaterally labeled an enemy combatant drove some of them insane:

A U.S. military officer warned Pentagon officials that an American detainee was being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory deprivation in a U.S. military brig, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and provided to The Associated Press...

They were deprived of natural light for months and for years were forbidden even minor distractions such as a soccer ball or a dictionary.

"I will continue to do what I can to help this individual maintain his sanity, but in my opinion we're working with borrowed time," an unidentified Navy brig official wrote of prisoner Yaser Esam Hamdi in 2002. "I would like to have some form of an incentive program in place to reward him for his continued good behavior, but more so, to keep him from whacking out on me."

This was not even in Gitmo. It was in a military brig in Norfolk, Virginia and Charleston, South Carolina, where the torture occurred on American soil and even against an American citizen, Jose Padilla. Many decent people in the armed forces resisted Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, but they couldn't stop them:

An officer was still raising alarms about Hamdi's mental state after 14 months of jail with no contact with lawyers, his family or even other prisoners. "I told him the last thing that I wanted to have happen was to send him anywhere from here as a 'basket case,' of use to no one, to include himself," the officer wrote in an e-mail to undisclosed government officials in June 2003. "I fear the rubber band is nearing its breaking point here and not totally confident I can keep his head in the game much longer."

These people we made insane are the people we were trying to get intelligence from! You think insane people give us reliable information? Now recall the consequences of this torture with respect to Jose Padilla:

"During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body," Mr. Patel said. "The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel."...

Now recall what we found out about Qahtani:

At the end of months of sleep deprivation and other forms of torture, Qahtani, according to an FBI letter, "was evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to non existent people, reporting hearing voices, crouching in a cell covered with a sheet for hours on end)."

The established legal definition of torture is the infliction of "severe mental or physical" "pain or suffering" to gain intelligence. If you do believe these individuals have been subjected to severe mental pain and suffering, then George W. Bush is a war criminal.

(Photo: an official photograph showing the lengths to which Padilla's guards went to maintain his total sensory deprivation. The goggles and earmuffs block out all sound and light, and he is manacled hand and foot, while being taken to have a tooth fixed. He is no security threat, but he is treated like an animal.)

A glossary of Dish awards can be found here.

Arguably, this is the first great, system-perturbing crisis of globalization, because it truly captures all the main players in a way that previous ones did not.

As always, the question will be: What new rules and rule-setting venues emerge? Because eventually they must. The Asian Flu didn't do it, nor have any of the other more regional shocks since, but eventually you need some entities to emerge to monitor and manage these cross-border financial flows. This gap has been clear for many years, but as long as informal collusion among the largest economies has worked--just well enough--no one's been willing to surrender the power. Maybe this perturbation, then, is really the one.

"As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can relieve only by making some sharp retort," - George Orwell.

(Hat tip: David Polansky. Photo: Jewel Samad/Getty.)

They for a singular subject was introduced by those who wanted to rid English of sexism. At a time when equal opportunity added millions of women to the work force, using he as a generalizing pronoun is silly, but it is desirable that a medicine be not worse than the disease.

An easy way exists of discovering when the tenant’s dilemma emerged. Our best dictionaries give away the truth. In the first edition of Random House Unabridged Dictionary (1966), the entry they occupies eight lines and is trivial. In the second edition (1993), a long section on usage was added, which I will reproduce in full: “Long before the use of generic he was condemned as sexist, the pronouns they, their, and them were used in educated speech and in all but the most formal writing to refer to indefinite pronouns and to single nouns of general personal reference, probably because such nouns are not felt to be exclusively singular: If anyone calls, tell them I’ll be back at six. Everybody began looking at their books at once. Such use is not a recent development, nor is it a mark of ignorance. Shakespeare, Swift, Shelley, Scott, and Dickens, as well as many other English and American writers, have used they and its forms to refer to singular antecedents. Already widespread in the language (though still rejected as ungrammatical by some), this use of they, their, and them is increasing in all but the most conservatively edited American English. This increased use is partly impelled by the desire to avoid the sexist implications of he as a pronoun of general reference.” Almost nothing in this comment is controversial. Yet I will point to three things. The phrase singular antecedents disguises the fact that only words like everybody and perhaps person are meant. Also, I would avoid references to Shakespeare. His grammar is so different from ours that it cannot guide modern English usage. Even Fielding should probably be left alone. Finally, in the reference to Scott, Dickens, and “many other English and American writers,” it would have been useful to state whether such syntax appears in their speech or in the speech of the characters. Let us note that in 1969 the editors of Random House Unabridged let they be and added a detailed comment justifying what seems to be age-old usage only in 1993 (why suddenly?).

I often use her as a generalizing pronoun. But this kind of dispute is better left to experts such as Barbara Wallraff, who writes Word Court and Word Fugitives for the Atlantic. Incidently, she has a new blog.

We have been given a clear warning about the vice-presidential nominee for the Republican party. We already know she is a pathological liar. We already know she refuses even basic transparency and accountability, refusing to hold a press conference as veep nominee for the first time in modern American political history and refusing to provide even minimal documentation of her fifth pregnancy. Barely into her first year as governor, as one might expect of such a person, she abused her power as governor of Alaska to persecute a former family member:

Finding Number One

For the reasons explained in section IV of this report, I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act. Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) provides The legislature reaffirms that each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.

Finding Number Two

I find that, although Walt Monegan's refusal to fire Trooper Michael Wooten was not the sole reason he was fired by Governor Sarah Palin, it was likely a contributing factor to his termination as Commissioner of Public Safety. In spite of that, Governor Palin's firing of Commissioner Monegan was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional and statutory authority to hire and fire executive branch department heads.

Finding Number Three

Harbor Adjustment Service of Anchorage, and its owner Ms. Murleen Wilkes, handled Trooper Michael Wooten's workers' compensation claim property and in the normal course of business like any other claim processed by Harbor Adjustment Service and Ms. Wilkes. Further, Trooper Wooten received all the workers' compensation benefits to which he was entitled.

Finding Number Four

The Attorney General's office has failed to substantially comply with my August 6, 2008 written request to Governor Sarah Palin for infomration about the case in the form of emails.

President George W. Bush leaves after speaking on the status of the US and global economy in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 10, 2008. By Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty.

So I hear (via a prominent member of the sane Republican faction) that the word on the right side of the street is that the Republican National Committee is about to pull the plug on its joint ads with the McCain campaign, and devote its resources instead to trying to save a couple of the senators who are at serious risk of losing their seats. Now this is gossip, albeit of the high class variety; take it with the requisite pinch of salt.

Obama wasn't a tea leaf reader; every black person I know predicted this. This is what our lives have been and are. It's just that people many have dismissed it when we've tried to tell them. That's why Coates suggests that if Obama loses, we won't freak out. This stuff is not new.

He just snatched the microphone out the hands of a woman who began her question with, "I'm scared of Barack Obama... he's an Arab terrorist..."

"No, no ma'am," he interrupted. "He's a decent family man with whom I happen to have some disagreements."

I guess making it explicit helped goad him back to minimal decency. Now can he stop running ads that imply exactly the same thing?

But what's also clear is that McCain's tactics are over the line, with no restraint in sight ... I was in contact over the past 24 hours with another veteran of recent Republican presidential campaigns and asked, on a not-for-attribution basis, whether he believed McCain's campaign is taking a big risk with its negative turn. "Yes," this strategist replied. "Big mistake. If this stuff mattered, then why didn't they raise it five months ago? Sad."

With 25 days to go until the election, Barack Obama is presently at his all-time highs in four of the six national tracking polls (Research 2000, Battleground, Hotline and Zogby) and is just one point off his high in Gallup. He has emerged with clear leads in both Florida and Ohio, where there are several polls out today. He is blowing McCain out in most polls of Pennsylvania and Michigan, and is making states like West Virgina and Georgia competitive.

Rasmussen just gave Obama a 16 point lead in Michigan. Which is in the Twilight Zone. I always believed that when Americans woke up to the reality of the past eight years, we would not have an adjustment, we'd have an earthquake. Maybe that's what's happening.

I’m currently deployed to Baghdad right now, and we kind of had a rough day out here. I wasn’t in a good mood when I left work this evening, but I got online to browse for a few quick minutes and came across your most recent Mental Health Break. That really put it all in perspective and helped cheer me right up.

It’s been an honor to serve over here, and while I didn’t agree with this war, I’m confident we’re doing good things over here.  For me, so far it’s about three months down, nine to go!  And man, do I need to get me a dog!

"We call ourselves "public servants" but I'll tell you this: We as public servants must set an example for the rest of the nation. It is hypocritical for the public official to admonish and exhort the people to uphold the common good if we are derelict in upholding the common good. More is required -- More is required of public officials than slogans and handshakes and press releases. More is required. We must hold ourselves strictly accountable. We must provide the people with a vision of the future.

If we promise as public officials, we must deliver. If -- If we as public officials propose, we must produce. If we say to the American people, "It is time for you to be sacrificial" -- sacrifice. If the public official says that, we [public officials] must be the first to give. We must be. And again, if we make mistakes, we must be willing to admit them. We have to do that," - Barbara Jordan, 1976.

(Photo: Robyn Beck/Getty)

...the Ayers attack, pushed hard this week by the McCain campaign, and ampliflied by the media, is not burning up the web. Discussion of McCain's tactics is. That, not Ayers, is the McCain story of the week.

Ponta Verde, Fogo, Cape Verde, 8.50 am.

This is sure to come up at the next presidential debate, which focuses on domestic policy. Obama and McCain will, no doubt, condemn same-sex marriage. But it’s a moot point. The wall is crumbling. With three separate states allowing it—Massachusetts, California and now Connecticut—and the fabric of society remaining strong, the specter of gay marriage threatening straight marriage is soundly proven to be a canard.

But we have yet to hold California, the most critical state of them all. You can donate here.

(Hat tip: Nicola Karras)

John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

We’ve injected so much debt into the system over the past decade that not only can’t we borrow our way out of the consequences of the real estate bubble popping, but we’re going to have to start paying off a lot of the existing debt in the face of a poor economy. What Paulson and Bernanke are doing is to make this adjustment only painful instead of catastrophic.

John McCain: In 2000, as a lifelong Republican, I worked to get you elected instead of George W. Bush. In return, you wrote an endorsement of one of my books about military service. You seemed to be a man who put principle ahead of mere political gain. You have changed. You have a choice: Go down in history as a decent senator and an honorable military man with many successes, or go down in history as the latest abettor of right-wing extremist hate.

John McCain, you are no fool, and you understand the depths of hatred that surround the issue of race in this country. You also know that, post-9/11, to call someone a friend of a terrorist is a very serious matter. You also know we are a bitterly divided country on many other issues. You know that, sadly, in America, violence is always just a moment away. You know that there are plenty of crazy people out there.

Stop! Think! Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.

As for the educated class, that's an interesting question. Much like with the conservative wing's mistrust of Hispanics, it's a policy that might have seemed electorally wise a couple years ago but is growing more questionable with every passing election. At some point, the demographic trends predicted by The Emerging Democratic Majority's will reach sufficient maturity and the GOP's decades-long effort to drive away the educated and young and the different is going to leave them making ever more exclusionary appeals to an ever smaller slice of the electorate.

What Rove never realized is that many of us fought hard for intellectual and moral respect for conservatism in college and grad school, only to have our efforts turned into a joke by the crassness of the Party Of Rove. There were only a few self-described conservatives at Harvard when I was there, and I spent a great deal of time losing friends, breaking up dinners, offending professors because I was a) right of center and b) obviously academically serious. And now I'm supposed to defend Sarah Palin? As vice-president? I mean: seriously?