We officially have a nominee.

In a nice gesture, it was Clinton who motioned for the acclamation:

Sen. Hillary Clinton motioned to cut the roll call short saying, “With eyes firmly fixed on the future, and in the spirit of unity with the goal of victory, with faith in our party and our country, let’s declare together with one voice right here, right now that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be our president.”

“Is there a second?” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California asked the crowd of more than 4,400 delegates.

Delegates then affirmed Obama as their choice with cheers, officially capping a long and hard-fought battle between Obama and Clinton.

“You know, it was once said of the first George Bush that he was born on third base and thought he’d hit a triple. Well, with the 22 million new jobs and the budget surplus Bill Clinton left behind, George W. Bush came into office on third base, and then he stole second.”

-Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, channeling Ann Richards

The world’s most reliable news source has called the election.

Someday, I hope I can own ten houses and still label my opponent an “elitist”.

I wonder why it is that McCain doesn’t seem to understand the middle-class credit crisis. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that even if his beer-heiress wife somehow managed to bungle the mortgage on one of their houses, they’d still have nine to fall back on.

You have got to be kidding me.

The maker of touch-screen voting machines used in half of Ohio’s counties has admitted that its own programming error is to blame for votes being dropped in some counties.

The problem can’t be fixed before the Nov. 4 election, so Premier Election Solutions and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner are issuing guidelines to counties for how to avoid the problem.

“We will continue to monitor the situation and provide boards of elections with the instruction and support they need to ensure an orderly and efficient election and an accurate count of Ohioans’ votes,” Brunner said in a memo released today.

Premier, formerly Diebold Election Systems, initially speculated that the problem was a conflict between its system and anti-virus software.

But in a letter Tuesday to Brunner, Premier President David Byrd admitted that further testing showed a source-code error that can cause votes not to be recorded when memory cards are uploaded to computer servers under certain circumstances.

Well, luckily Ohio’s not some battleground state that’s just as likely to go for one candidate as the other, so some dropped votes won’t matte—OH NO WAIT I MEANT THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF THAT.

Senator Joseph Lieberman, Al Gore’s Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2000, will appear at this year’s Republican convention in support of party White House nominee John McCain.

The Republican Party announced Wednesday that Lieberman, who sits as an independent in the Senate after breaking with the Democrats over Iraq, will speak on the first night of the convention on Monday September 1.

Read on.

Would you pay $10 if it would get Obama elected?

What about $20?

What about $100? What’s your threshold? How much is an Obama presidency worth to you?

Okay, now that you know your number… have you done it?

The New York Times provides a fascinating insight into the TV show most quoted on Bray New World, The Daily Show:

Though this spot is the program’s mocking sendup of itself and the news media’s mania for self-promotion, it inadvertently gets at one very real truth: the emergence of “The Daily Show” as a genuine cultural and political force. When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press to name the journalist they most admired, Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, came in at No. 4, tied with the real news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Anderson Cooper of CNN. And a study this year from the center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that “ ‘The Daily Show’ is clearly impacting American dialogue” and “getting people to think critically about the public square.”

Read on at the Times.

Webcomic xkcd has the right of it on the electronic voting machines.

Time magazine writes:

How out of touch is Barack Obama? He’s so out of touch that he suggested that if all Americans inflated their tires properly and took their cars for regular tune-ups, they could save as much oil as new offshore drilling would produce. Gleeful Republicans have made this their daily talking point; Rush Limbaugh is having a field day; and the Republican National Committee is sending tire gauges labeled “Barack Obama’s Energy Plan” to Washington reporters.

But who’s really out of touch? The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030. We use about 20 million bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. In other words: Obama is right.