A judge has dismissed a lawsuit against Apple for its iPhone batteries.

But if you do lose power to your iPhone, you can always yo-yo it back.

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On a night when Obama was left holding his own, spanked, bottom, CNN’s front page looks like so:

Remember, Eric Alterman says the media is biased to the right!

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Because he’s either braver or dumberer than I am, reader “BP” (name withheld by request) read Andrew Sullivan’s liveblog of tonight’s debate. And caught Sully saying, “We may soon end this nightmare of barbarism in the heart of the United States. And then we can bring the war criminals to justice.”

BP was good enough to include a screenshot, in case Sully regains a portion of a part of whatever might remain of one of his extant senses, and flush that pair of reprehensible sentences down the memory hole.

(Click to embiggen, save, and pass on to your favorite nutrooter.)

When will the Atlantic tire of Sully? I know I have already. Running on nearly five years now.

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Senator Kennedy has already been released to go home. I don’t agree with the man’s politics, and he’s done some pretty lousy things — but he is a United States Senator.

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During tonight’s debate, Obama claimed that “no soldier ever dies in vain.”

Oh really, Senator?

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I’m drunkblogging the debate – right now! – for PJ Media. Bruce Carroll is Vicodinblogging the debate because, well, he has some.

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Suicides are up where I live, but nobody knows why:

After a few years of declining suicides, 108 people committed suicide in El Paso County in 2007, compared with 64 the year before. And even more people will die of suicide in 2008, if this year’s pace continues.

The El Paso County Coroner’s Office ruled 68 deaths as suicide through Aug. 31, with at least 19 more cases preliminarily ruled suicide through Thursday, said Deputy Coroner Chris Herndon. That puts the county on pace for about 117 suicides this year – the highest number since 120 people killed themselves in 2004, when the Colorado Springs metro area had the highest suicide rate of any large city in the country outside of Las Vegas.

“How can we continue to say Colorado Springs ranks high as a great place to live and is a great place to raise a family when the suicide rate is off the charts?” said Janet Karnes, director of the Suicide Prevention Partnership of the Pikes Peak Region.

As usual, I have a theory.

Not too many people saw the 1988 movie “White Mischief,” about decadent British colonials in Kenya during the dark days of World War II. One character, played by Sarah Miles, was still awake for a breathtaking dawn. Her last words were, “Oh God, not another fucking beautiful day.” And then she pulled the trigger.

Stay away from Colorado. It’s too pretty here.

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Buyer’s remorse for Sarah Palin? Bridget Johnson thinks Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal would have been the smarter choice.

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Here’s something I never thought I’d see in the New York Times:

For Mr. Obama, the financial crisis poses different risks. He wants to appear fired up over the economy, but he has written before about wanting to avoid appearing like a stereotypical angry black man. Unlike Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton and other black leaders whose fulminations could scare white voters, Mr. Obama is not from and of New York, Detroit, or the segregated South; he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. To some degree Mr. Obama faces the opposite challenge from fiery black leaders who came before him: Is he too cool for a crisis like this one?

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.

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Are we due for a liberal realignment?

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John McCain has had a bad week. Sure, he pulled New Hampshire from “Leans Dem” to “Toss Up,” but today Rasmussen moved vote-rich Ohio from “Leans Rep” to “Toss Up.”

Rasmussen also notes that Obama has pulled ahead in Virginia and Colorado, too. McCain’s lead is down to a single point in Florida. If this keeps up, we’ll have to take the red off of the Sunshine State. Indiana isn’t looking much better.

As of right now, the map looks like this.

Of course, the new polls haven’t had enough time to reflect McCain’s on-again/off-again campaign and debate appearances — so who knows what things will look like next week.

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Gerard Baker wants to know who would want to be the next President, anyway?

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In a postmodern campaign, you don’t wait for an event to end before starting the spin. Here’s how Team Obama is trying to lower the bar:

The Obama campaign distributed a memo this afternoon titled “Home-field advantage: John McCain.” Though the debate’s moderator Jim Lehrer is quite likely to dip into questions about the economy, the night’s focus is foreign policy, which the Obama campaign calls “McCain’s professed area of expertise.”

“If he slips up, makes a mistake, or fails to deliver a game-changing performance, it will be a serious blow to his campaign,” according to the memo. “Given his unsteady performance this week, he desperately needs to win this debate in a big way in order to change the topic and get back to his home turf.”

The memo goes on to footnote more than half a dozen media clips that the Obama campaign says tout Mr. McCain’s prowess as a debater as well as several more articles under the bold-faced heading “Debates are not a good format for Obama.”

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Iran’s notorious gay-bashing, Jew-hating President got quite the warm welcome in… Kansas? Montana? Alaska? Nope! But they love him in New York:

Instead, Ahmadinejad felt welcome. He spent a couple of hours schmoozing at New York’s Grand Hyatt with representatives of the American “peace movement.”

Jodie Evans, a founder of the anti-war group Code Pink, actually had a sit-down with Ahmadinejad. “It’s rare,” she explained, “for a head of state to take time during an official U.N. visit to meet with the peace community, especially in a situation where the host government — represented by the Bush administration — is so hostile.”

Sad.

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Putting McCain’s debate postponement in perspective.

By the way, I’m still scheduled to drunkblog tonight’s debate for PJ Media. If there’s no debate, I plan on going ahead and drinking the old fashioned way, with the TV off.

UPDATE: Of course there’s a debate tonight, which I noted hours ago. Let this post serve as a warning of the danger in scheduled posting.

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When will they learn to not piss off the people with the guns?

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Right Wing News has a “blockbuster” interview with Senator Jim DeMint.

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Was McCain right about the economy yesterday when the crisis got so bad he suspended his campaign? Or was he correct last week when he said the economy was “fundamentally strong?” Let’s ask Max Boot:

What the pessimists ignore is that the fundamentals of the U.S. economy remain strong. [Oh. -ed.] Indeed, the World Economic Forum has ranked the United States as the world’s most competitive economy for the past two years. (The new survey comes out in October.) Its statistics show that per-capita gross domestic product in the U.S. consistently has grown faster than in other developed economies since 1980.

Looking deeper at the causes of American competitiveness shows that we score especially strongly not only in domestic market size (No. 1 in the world) but also in such areas as time required to start a business (No. 3), venture capital availability (No. 1), the cost of firing an employee (No. 1), ownership of personal computers (No. 2), university/industry research collaboration (No. 1) and quality of scientific research institutions (No. 2).

But it’s not all good news. Boot also notes that the US economy suffers from “high tax rates and cumbersome tax regulations.”

Both candidates promise more regulation, if only by example. Only one, however, has threatened us with higher taxes, no matter what the ramifications might be.

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Paul McCartney put on a concert in Tel Aviv, more than 40 years after the Beatles were originally to have performed in Israel.

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Tonight’s presidential debate is back on track. I’ll be drunkblogging live at 6:45PM Mountain at PJ Media.

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Eve Eptstein reviews Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech to the UN:

For the sake of a reader who might be disbelieving, it is well to quote these paragraphs in full. This text was delivered before the diplomats from 190 countries. The United States and Israel had already left the room. No other country sought to make a point of order, to move to strike the remarks from the record as inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations or to leave the room in protest during the speech. On the contrary, his antisemitic hatemongering was applauded. The president of the General Assembly embraced Ahmadinejad after the speech was completed.

To their shame, U.N. member states’ pledges of “Never Again” were betrayed by a singular lack of moral outcry. Have they learned nothing from the multitude of Holocaust education and genocide prevention programs they sponsored?

Ahmadinejad said to the United Nations assembly: “The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a miniscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the U.S. in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner.”

And then the Iranian head-thug lamented that any political candidate might even talk to the Jewish community — mimicking the phrase recently heard in American politics, about “what politicians do.”

I never said it was a positive review.

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Again, Sarah Palin refuses to meet the press, all meeting-like.

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How is Chrysler going to produce not one, but three, largely-imaginary plug-in hybrid vehicles when they’re ditching even white-collar workers left and right?

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Courtesy of Glenn Reynolds, it’s the NRA ad that the Obama campaign has been sending lawyers, (no) guns, and money to stop you from seeing.

Spread it around.

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Frozen pork king Ted Stevens is now on trial:

The lawyer for Sen. Ted Stevens told a federal jury in D.C. today that the Alaska Republican paid every bill he received for a home renovation project and had no idea he wasn’t being charged for some of the work.

In his opening statement at Stevens’ corruption trial, defense attorney Brendan Sullivan said the senator and his wife believed they had paid the fair market price for the renovations and didn’t know that his friend, oil executive Bill Allen, was keeping other bills or costs from them.

But prosecutors said that the free work was part of a long pattern of gifts Stevens is accused of concealing. Allen gave the senator a gas grill, a generator, a complicated exterior rope lighting system and a sweetheart deal on a car, they said.

It’s not just that Stevens is crooked, it’s that he could be had so damn cheap.

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Washington still can’t put a Wall Street bailout package together, even with Bush, McCain, and Obama all working hand-in-hand. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Here’s the deal:

“If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down,” President Bush declared Thursday as he watched the $700 billion bailout package fall apart before his eyes, according to one person in the room.

It was an implosion that spilled out from behind closed doors into public view in a way rarely seen in Washington. Left uncertain was the fate of the bailout, which the White House says is urgently needed to fix broken financial and credit markets, as well as whether the first presidential debate would go forward as planned Friday night in Mississippi.

When Congressional leaders and Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, the two major party presidential candidates, trooped to the White House Thursday afternoon, all signs pointed toward a bipartisan agreement on a grand compromise that could be accepted by all sides and signed into law by the weekend. It was to have pumped billions of dollars into the financial system and transformed the way Wall Street is regulated.

“We’re in a serious economic crisis,” Mr. Bush told reporters as the meeting began shortly before 4 p.m. in the Cabinet Room, adding, “My hope is we can reach an agreement very shortly.”

And here’s the problem. Wasn’t it loose money that got us into this mess in the first place? How is “loosened” money supposed to help now?

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GM is so short of capital, that it tried to sell its medium-truck business to Isuzu.

But the truck business has cratered so deep that Isuzu wasn’t willing to take it, not even at a discount.

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