“It's like electing Obi-Wan Kenobi as president.”

Oh, that interweb! What a fabulous, seductive, time-wasting mindsuck it is! I can hardly pull myself away from my battered, well-used Mac, my portal to the electronic universe and all its constantly churning, burning, head-turning election-related news, gossip, misinformation, blithering nonsense and shocking exposés. It's like candy, cartoons, a train-wreck and a party all at once. Yes, it's true: I am a political junkie.

Between the things I find on my own and the great links friends send to me, I've been enjoying and passing along URLs like a communion chalice: take, drink, this is the life's blood of the body politic. If you, like I, have an unquenchable thirst for such sustenance, here are links to some of the political news and humor sites I’ve enjoyed most in the past week. See which if any you've missed.

• Seventy-six American Nobel Prize winners endorse Obama according to this article in Salon.com.

• Humorist extraordinaire David Sedaris gives his views on undecided voters in this article in the latest issue of the New Yorker magazine.

• You've read stories about voting machines that go out of calibration and show a vote for another candidate even when a voter chooses his or her candidate properly, right? Well, here's a video that shows vote flipping in action, even immediately after recalibration. It's a sight more chilling than any horror movie.

• Slate.com contributors divulge their presidential choices and explain their reasons in this article. The tally? Fifty-five for Barack Obama, one for John McCain, one for Bob Barr, and one for "Not McCain." My favorite entries were by Michael Kinsley, Dahlia Lithwick, Farhad Manjoo, Jack Shafer (whose description of his chosen candidate, the Libertarian Party's Bob Barr, as "a chowderhead's chowderhead" is priceless) and writer Tim Wu, who wrote of Obama, "Most of all, I like his obvious inner calm. It suggests that his decisions will come from somewhere other than expediency, anger, or fear. It's like electing Obi-Wan Kenobi as president."

• Want to take a peek at records of political donations given by thousands of celebrities, sports stars, billionaires, politicians, media people and CEOs? Find out who gave how much to whom here.

• Major media have been engaged in a legal battle with the United States Navy over records that they believe show that John McCain was involved in an accident that injured or may have even killed someone. The Huffington Post announced in this article that "Vanity Fair magazine and the National Security News Service claim to have knowledge 'developed from first-hand sources' of a car crash that involved then-Lt. McCain at the main gate of a Virginia naval base in 1964, according to legal filings. The incident has been largely, if not entirely, kept from the public. And in documents suing the Navy to release pertinent information, lawyers for the NS News Service allege that a cover-up may be at play."

• Is Sarah Palin going rogue? Here’s what CNN has to say about it.

• Remember the classic "Wassaaaap!" Budweiser ad from 2000? (Okay, I’d never seen it till this week, though I'd heard it referred to many times by Michael and Dwight on "The Office." (Ricky Gervais' original British version of "The Office" even gave it a nod.) You can see the original here, and then see the fantastic pro-Obama parody update to it here. It’s one of the most brilliant bits of two-minute filmmaking I’ve ever seen. (True.)

• Atlantic magazine editor (and noted gay, British-born, HIV-positive conservative—try to get your mind around that combo) Andrew Sullivan lists the Top Ten Reasons Conservatives Should Vote for Obama. They're excellent reasons, too.

• Did you hear Sarah Palin's jeering dismissal of federal funding for genetic research on fruit flies? Or John McCain's mocking of the use of government money to study the DNA of grizzly bears? Their use of those particular examples of supposedly wasteful spending show their shocking lack of desire to understand how scientific research works. Sneering, ignorant anti-intellectualism like this underscores their fear of and contempt for well-educated citizens. In a scathing and spot-on article in Slate, the frequently frightening, usually conservative Christopher Hitchens (who has written books excoriating Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, among other subjects) writes about "The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning." Here’s my favorite excerpt:

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.”

As for the supposedly ridiculous expenditure of $3 million to study grizzly bear DNA, Hitchens goes on to say:

As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)

• This is how it looks when Barack is at the wheel of the Democratic Partaaaay.

• Joe Biden does a great job of challenging so-called reporter Barbara West of station WFTV in Florida when she does nothing but mouth McCain’s nonsensical talking points in this Huffington Post video.

• Opie loves Obama! Here’s a charming video in which Ron Howard goes back to his roots with friends Andy Griffith and Henry Winkler. (By the way, if you want to see another side of Andy Griffith and one hell of a scene-chewing, career-making performance, check out the 1957 Elia Kazan film "A Face in the Crowd." Griffith is mesmerizing as "Lonesome" Rhodes, a nobody who becomes a political demagogue by working the media.)

• Finally, here are some inspiring photos of Obama giving a speech in the rain in Chester, Pennsylvania this week. I look at them and think, oh, please, please may I call that guy my president?