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The Discovery’s 13-day trip to space provides a weirdly addictive online experience, with clear, real-time footage beamed by NASA directly into our little work boxes. It adds up to a zonked-out, hypnotizing effect: the slowly rotating shuttle, the continental expanses drifting by, the Boards of Canada playing on the headset. Somebody pass the brownies.

This footage, from Thursday, shows Discovery performing a “back flip” maneuver so the space station could photograph the tiles on the belly of shuttle, to make sure there was no damage after takeoff. Shortly after this sequence, it docked with the station.

Open Salon interview.

A struggling Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., went nuclear Wednesday, with an ad that tries to ally challenger Bob Casey with North Korea and China. Ah, the acrid smell of desperation in the weeks before a congressional election! Be prepared for even more of these terror-filled spots in these glorious final days of Campaign 2006, all of which carry a little DNA from the mother of all scare ads: The 1964 Lyndon Johnson “Daisy Girl” ad against Barry Goldwater (bottom ad, below).

From Michael Scherer’s piece today: “The GOP seems to believe that Ford’s appeal to its most reliable voters is working. In recent days, the Republican National Committee has attempted to reverse the troubling polls in Tennessee with a television ad that both attacks Ford’s religious credentials and invokes that old standby of American politics, racial fear.”

This National Republican Senatorial Committee ad against Harold Ford sports an early mention of a Playboy connection that the party hopes will rile Christians against Ford.

Salon’s piece on Rep. Harold Ford Jr.’s senate campaign spotlights his appeal to churchgoers, as in the TV spot below.