Response Time

Time to once answer your serious questions with a lot of half-assery and horseshit. It's the Daily Banter mailbag.

This week: Would mandatory voting work in the United States? What do you do if your spouse plans to vote for Romney and is a smug, condescending prick to you for voting for Obama? And just how dumb are Americans as a whole?

Read the Answers Here

The Bubble Genius Bob & Chez Show, 11.1.12

Last show before the election; Benghazi Gate; Impeaching the president; Anti-Obama progressives and voting third party; Matt Stoller Is an Amusingly Self-Righteous Tool; The latest polls and Nate Silver; Hurricane Sandy; Christie and Obama at Brigantine; Mitt Romney failed the leadership test again; Sandy and the climate crisis; and much more. Brought to you by Bubble Genius.

There’s more election talk in this week’s After Party including Bob’s prediction for the election later today. If you’re not a member, subscribe already. Only $6/month, cancel any time.

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Listening Post

Halloween's great and all, but the two days that follow actually mark one of my favorite times of the year. Christians call it "All Saints Day" or "All Souls Day," but in Mexico -- and of course here in Los Angeles -- it's known as "El Dia de los Muertos," or "The Day of the Dead." You don't have to be religious to appreciate religious symbolism or iconography -- and you don't have to subscribe to the beliefs behind it to be drawn to the eerie beauty of the Day of the Dead celebration.

You know how I feel about holiday tradition around here, so every year, on this day, one of the most criminally overlooked bits of musical brilliance from the 90s rises from the dead and dances seductively into the light. The song and video are gorgeous and playfully surreal and the band -- well, there's not enough you can say about them.

Here's the great Los Lobos doing Kiko and the Lavender Moon.

Vote Abby 2012

I think I speak for all of us when I say that this little girl speaks for all of us.

Quote of the Day

"Does deploying these ads at the last minute really seem like a move from a campaign that feels confident it’s going to win? These are some of the ugliest and most dishonest attacks of an unusually ugly and dishonest campaign. They’re the kind of ads you expect from a secretive outside group, not the campaign itself. They’re the kind of ads a campaign keeps in a glass case labeled, 'Break in case of emergency.' They feel desperate."

-- Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald on the rash of almost unimaginably dishonest last-minute campaign ads from the Romney camp and what they may say about its state-of-mind heading into election day

Romney's spent the past several months running the most brazenly mendacious campaign modern politics has ever seen -- one that goes far beyond the kind of pernicious spin we've come to expect from political candidates and into the realm of flat-out, easily debunked, staggeringly audacious lying. The idea that he could get any worse than he's been since the campaign began in earnest is kind of tough to wrap your head around -- and yet it's happening. When you lie so bombastically that the very people you're attempting to endear yourself to begin not simply calling you out for it but publicly saying that your surrogates who spread the same lie are "full of shit" -- that's when you know you're a scam-artist who's making the most desperate and cynical play for power the American people have probably ever seen in any of their lifetimes.

Q & A

If it's Thursday, it must be time for me to hit you up for questions for this week's Daily Banter mailbag. You know how this works -- I ask you nice people for questions about politics, pop culture, the media, the reason why your significant other refuses to do that thing with the anal beads, etc. and Bob, Ben and I try to answer them.

Submit your queries via the comment section of this post, Facebook, Twitter DM or e-mail -- the address is to the right -- and maybe you'll see yourself on the pages of the Daily Banter tomorrow morning.

It's the deal of the century.

Listening Post

The 2006 Under the Influence of Giants debut record was one of the best party albums of that or any other year. One of the founders of the band, Aaron Bruno, went on to put together Awolnation, and this is their most recently, eminently catchy single.

Here's Kill Your Heroes.