Yet another reason why more Americans should stay home on election day:

Republicans are generally convinced that Democrats are a bunch of self-destructive, naïve Commies. Democrats, conversely, assume a healthy plurality of Republicans boast the IQ of a spotted toad.

Well, the good folks at the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press recently measured the political acumen of more than 3,000 adults and found that we’re equally uninformed and both ridiculously ill-equipped to vote….

And since most of us are hopelessly dense — or, at least, that’s the rationalization we hear every time a Republican is elected — it is interesting to note that viewers of Fox News’ partisan slugfest, Hannity & Colmes, scored only 2 percent below those smarty pants who listen to NPR.

In fact, larger numbers of habitual listeners of Rush Limbaugh than erudite readers of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair were able to explain who is in charge of Congress.

Read the whole thing, courtesy of the Denver Post’s David Harsanyi (and a hat tip to Matt Welch).

Let’s face it—most of the yuppies who pledge allegiance to Vanity Fair and NPR read only James Wolcott’s pieces and listen only to Car Talk (and/or A Prairie Home Companion). As a reader of VF (though not the New Yorker) I’m downright embarrassed that my fellow subscribers couldn’t beat Douche Limbaugh’s listeners in a very simple poll. What the fuck, people? You call yourselves the liberal elite? Get it together. Take notes. Buy a highlighter or something. Consider making flash cards.

[Side note: I wanted to work at NPR once upon a time, and an older, wiser journalist told me that the only times I wouldn't regret working in public radio would be during cocktail parties, when I could brag about working for next to nothing in a medium that no one cares about. I now suspect that catering to listeners who know less than AM nut jobs would cancel out the cocktail effect.]

Maybe he’ll want to revive his column for The Nation again! Is this Hitchens endorsement a shocker? Not really when you consider the man’s distaste for lies, propaganda, stupidity, and so on. He writes best when putting McCain in his place (saying what so many are at least thinking):

“But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week’s so-called townhall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.”

I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged, that the Obama campaign’s choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it’s only a euphemism. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had to feel sorry for the old lion on his last outing and wish that he could be taken somewhere soothing and restful before the night was out. The train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—”My friends”—to get him through the next 10 seconds. I haven’t felt such pity for anyone since the late Adm. James Stockdale humiliated himself as Ross Perot’s running mate. And I am sorry to have to say it, but Stockdale had also distinguished himself in America’s most disastrous and shameful war, and it didn’t qualify him then and it doesn’t qualify McCain now.

Ouch.

Today’s Washington Post has a horror story about how the apparent collapse of Century Pool Management, a swimming pool management firm in Gaithersburg, left a lot of young foreign lifeguards stranded in the U.S.

City Paper wrote about that same company’s reliance on labor from Eastern Europe at the beginning of the pool season.

At the time, Century and others in the recreation realm were complaining that changes in work visa regulations would keep tens of thousands of experienced lifeguards out of the U.S. this year. Only foreign students were still able to take the seasonal work legally this summer, while veteran first responders, who used to get into the U.S. using H-2B visas, were shut out when those visas were all-but eliminated amid the anti-immigration mania on Capitol Hill.

Century’s foreign lifeguards are quoted in the Post piece that Century stopped paying them before summer’s end, and now the company has shut its offices leaving the imported laborers unable to afford the trips home.

Welcome to America!

As you can see by this sticker, which is attached to its side, the refrigerator in the employee lounge (the good one, not the one for editorial) is important to this company. If for some reason you see this refrigerator anywhere besides the employee lounge, please let us know.

It shouldn’t be hard to spot—it has had the same metal bowl on top for the whole two years I’ve worked here. There used to be a magnet shaped like a laptop that said “You’ve got mail!” when you pressed a button, but some sharp-eyed nostalgia collector snapped that up. Now there’s a smiley-face magnet and a couple Alison Bechdel strips.

After the jump, some situations in which you might find our fridge.

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