Andrew Sullivan says it's getting difficult to tell who's the Conservative in the current presidential race and who's the Liberal.

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson brings us Fear and Loathing on the 2004 campaign trail. If you don't enjoy the logic (there's some in there), you might enjoy the sheer, uninhibited quality of the syntax.

Want to know where your polling place is? Want to help someone else find theirs? Then visit MyPollingSite.com. A free public service of someone who's doing it just for a good cause.

I'm intrigued by all the newspapers and columnists who supported Bush in 2000 and are now behind John Kerry. Some are half-hearted Kerry endorsements, to be sure, but my own vote for Kerry is more a vote against Bush than a belief that the Junior Senator from Massachusetts is the saviour of our nation. And I always like to see someone in the public eye say "I was wrong" because I think the pundits and papers are wrong a lot, and are usually too stubborn to admit it.

Here's Chicago-Tribune columnist Steve Chapman explaining why he's about to take the unusual (for him) step and voting for a Democrat for President.

According to this, at least 33 papers that backed Bush in 2000 have now endorsed Kerry. They include The Chicago Sun-Times, The Los Angeles Daily News and The Memphis Commercial-Appeal (registration required so I won't bother linking).

Bush has only picked up two papers that endorsed Gore: The Denver Post and The Columbus Dispatch — and both of those, if you read them, are pretty tepid recommendations. An awful lot of papers that backed Bush four years ago are also declining to endorse this time, which means that they're not happy with him.

If anyone sees another example the other way — a prominent newspaper or columnist who backed Gore in 2000 and is now for Bush — please let me know. I'd love to see it and link to it.

The servers are probably overloaded but you may be able to download this video clip of the Ashlee Simpson number from last night's Saturday Night Live.

From a friend who works at NBC in New York…

What happened last night on SNL was that Ashlee Simpson got caught using pretaped vocals. Like you said, singers do pretape and then lip-sync on the air. Usually the show frowns on this but sometimes during rehearsal it becomes apparent that the performer needs it. I don't know the specifics here but I'm told Simpson had prerecorded tracks for both songs she did last night. Her first song was called "Pieces of Me" and it went fine. Second song was supposed to be a new one called "Autobiography" but someone screwed up and they started playing "Pieces of Me" again. Big oops. Someone did a fast patch for the West Coast feed to make it less obvious what had happened but it wasn't that the band started playing the wrong number. It was whoever was supposed to change the DAT or the CD or whatever her playback was on. I wasn't there at the time but I can imagine they rejected the idea of editing in the dress rehearsal tape for the West Coast since it would betray the show's "live" credo more than making a small audio edit. You're right that they'll probably edit the dress tape in when the show gets rerun unless the incident becomes too famous.

A question for anyone who knows: I seem to recall one or more occasions where the dress rehearsal version of some SNL sketch went so well that they didn't even try doing it again on the live broadcast. They just rolled tape from dress. Does anyone else remember this?

I felt bad for Ashlee Simpson, if only because all the late night comedians are going to switch the Britney Spears lip-syncing jokes over to her. These jokes have an interesting heritage. Before Britney, they were about Mariah Carey…then before her, the Backstreet Boys. And at one point, in a slightly different form, they were all about Milli Vanilli. Recently, Madonna has been accused of pre-taping vocals but Ashlee has probably beaten her out to claim the mantle. She will hold it until someone else gets caught allegedly mouthing lyrics. It'll probably be George W. Bush but maybe not before the election.

We are, I suspect, long past the point where any opinion piece is going to sway anyone's vote for Bush over Kerry or Kerry over Bush. Still, I can't help but link to articles that I think make good points. The Orlando Sentinel is hardly a Democratic newspaper. They endorsed Bush four years ago but like many papers that did, they're against him this time. Here's the editorial.

What the heck happened with Ashlee Simpson's second musical number last night on Saturday Night Live? If you watched the live, East Coast feed you saw her introduced by host Jude Law…then the music started and her voice, obviously pre-taped, was heard but it wasn't coming out of her mouth. Instead of carrying on, she stopped all attempts at singing (or maybe lip-syncing) and went into a silly dance, then walked off the stage. The cameras held on her back-up band for about twenty seconds, then the director went to a commercial. During the show's closing when the cast gathered on stage, she apologized to the audience and said her band started playing the wrong song…but it sure looked like what had happened was that she had pre-taped the vocal for her number and someone began its playback too soon, catching her and the on-camera musicians unaware.

When the show was broadcast three hours later on the West Coast, the audio had been remixed to remove the playback of her vocals. So her number started and the music was a little odd, like everyone wasn't playing the same notes. Then she looked puzzled, did the silly dance, then walked off and the band played a bit 'til the director went to commercial. In other words, it did look like what she described in her closing statement…but that's only because the engineers had removed her vocal playback.

It is, of course, not at all unprecedented for performers to pre-tape all or part of their vocals and then lip-sync to that when the audience thinks they're singing live. Happens all the time, especially when the performance involves intricate choreography, but it makes audiences feel cheated so it is vigorously denied. Usually. It appears Ms. Simpson got caught doing this.

I don't think it's a big deal. I'm just kinda curious what will happen when this episode airs again. As mentioned before on this weblog, Saturday Night Live occasionally "fixes" things for reruns, replacing a messed-up segment with better footage from the dress rehearsal taping. When they rebroadcast the famous episode in which Sinead O'Connor concluded her second musical number by tearing up a photo of the Pope, that moment is not seen. They inserted some or all of the dress rehearsal performance which ended with her ripping up a different, non-controversial picture. Whole sketches have sometimes been taken from the earlier taping. Assuming Ashlee Simpson's second number went well when she did it in dress, that's probably what will be seen whenever last night's episode is broadcast in the future.

Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, writes a good endorsement of John Kerry. I'm not as sold on the Senator from Massachusetts as I'd like to be…but I agree with the negative assessment of Bush, and think Kerry could be a pretty lousy president and still be better than what we have now.

By now, you've probably watched Garfield and Friends, Volume 1 to the point of wearing grooves in the DVDs. You're just dying to get another two dozen episodes of the popular cartoon series that got me nominated for a couple of Emmy Awards I didn't win. Well, you've still got about six weeks to wait until they release Garfield and Friends, Volume 2 but you can order it right this sec from Amazon. Among the guest voice performers in this set are Pat Buttram, Louise DuArt, Frank Buxton, Carl Ballantine, Chick Hearn (yes, the late basketball announcer), Greg Berg, Jesse White, Stan Freberg, Gary Owens and June Foray, all appearing with the great Lorenzo Music, Gregg Berger, Thom Huge, Frank Welker, Howie Morris and Julie Payne.

In answer to a couple of questions: This set includes "Invasion of the Big Robots," which was the episode where Garfield makes a wrong turn and finds himself on an episode of a different cartoon show that looks suspiciously like a cross between G.I. Joe and The Transformers. It also includes "Video Airlines," which is the one that features frequent references to the movie, Kung Fu Creatures on the Rampage II.  Hope you like Volume 2. Hope you buy Volume 2.

Here's the kind of thing that drives up my cynicism about politics in this country, especially when it works. (The fact that the folks surrounding the President of the United States think it will work is bad enough.) It's the new TV commercial in which the Bush folks claim that John Kerry voted to slash our intelligence budget by $6 billion, and they imply that this was after 9/11. Fred Kaplan explains why it's less than honest.

Corey Klemow (Corey, your tape is in the mail) comes through with a link to a site that has the Triumph "Spin Alley" segment up.

I can't help but notice that a couple of the lines uttered by Triumph (Robert Smigel) sound like they were dubbed-in later. I would like to believe this was done just for editing reasons or because something he said at the event was inaudible. I'd hate to think they wrote lines later and added them in.

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in "Spin Alley" after the third Bush-Kerry debate…a segment shown tonight on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. I think they should forget about having Conan replace Jay and just give the job to Triumph.

Someone will probably post a clip online. If you see one before I do, let me know so I can give the link.

You can now get my buddy Leonard Maltin's indispensable Movie Guide on your Palmtop or Pocket PC Computer. Go here to do this.

If you're interested in seeing old episodes of Saturday Night Live that haven't been rerun to death, you'll want to set your TiVo or VCR next week. Very late Saturday night (aka very early Sunday morning), NBC is rerunning in full the 12/12/81 episode hosted by Bill Murray. This is from the season where Eddie Murphy blossomed, though I recall this particular show being dominated by Joe Piscopo and Father Guido Sarducci. I also recall it not being very good.

There's a bit of history in that episode, which was from the show's seventh season. The first five were the ones Lorne Michaels produced with the original cast, more or less. Most of the sixth was produced by Jean Doumanian and that year was generally regarded as a grand disaster. Late in that season, Doumanian was fired and Dick Ebersol was brought in to turn things around. One of the things he did was to re-hire Michael O'Donoghue as the show's creative center. "Mr. Mike" had been an influential writer during the first Michaels era but this turn of duty was contentious and unhappy. O'Donoghue, the story goes, kept writing and lobbying for bits that could never get past Standards and Practices…and in the opinion of those around him, weren't worth fighting for. In this episode, he contributed to the writing of a skit called "At Home with the Psychos" about a mutant family living near a nuclear facility. The sketch did air but without one prop that the art department whipped up under O'Donoghue's direction. It was a "blowhole" (like that of a whale) that one of the Psychos was to wear…but it looked too much like a vagina. Even others on the show's crew got fed up with O'Donoghue's attempts to get the silly thing on the air.

The final straw came a few days later when Ebersol held a post-mortem meeting with the cast to discuss what all agreed was a weak episode. O'Donoghue (the story goes) burst into the room and began insulting everyone, telling the cast members they were devoid of talent. Shortly after that, he was fired and that was the end of Michael O'Donoghue's involvement with Saturday Night Live.

Meanwhile, all next week, the E! Channel, which has mostly been running episodes of SNL from the Will Ferrell years goes back through the nineties for most of the Halloween episodes. These include a few episodes that Comedy Central rarely, if ever, reran when they had the package.