Scientists: "Turns out we don't know jack shit"

Colossal squid caught off Antarctica.

So it turns out the giant squid has an even more giant cousin, the colossal squid. And it lives now, in the deep sea. It's like one of the biggest animals to ever live on planet Earth, and it's just now in our modern, we-know-everything age of 2008 being discovered. They don't even know the gender of the 33-foot specimen in storage. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens: open mouth, insert foot.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7367774.stm

How big will this story get???

"For him [Barak Obama] to an offer an inartful explanation of that which informs these people’s lives and voting patterns only underlines his weakness with this constituency."

Here are the comments from a San Francisco Fundraiser (link to original story plus audio):

OBAMA: "So, it depends on where you are, but I think it's fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre...I think they're misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to 'white working-class don't wanna work -- don't wanna vote for the black guy.' That's...there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it's sort of a race thing.

Here's how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it. And when it's delivered by -- it's true that when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter).

But -- so the questions you're most likely to get about me, 'Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What's the concrete thing?' What they wanna hear is -- so, we'll give you talking points about what we're proposing -- close tax loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama's gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we're gonna provide health care for every American. So we'll go down a series of talking points.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background -- there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing."

So how big is it? I got slammed after Ohio and Texas after counting Hillary out. I think as just as Al Gore and Jimmy Carter were about to weigh in to call on Hillary to withdraw, she's been tossed another lifesaver. Can she win big in 10 days???