I mean, really, it's not exactly a new idea. As a pathetically dedicated connoisseur of all things teenagery, I've seen bits of the whole in a million different movies and TV shows. Kids like to gawp at good looking other kids, they like music, they like dancing, they like romance, and they like more than anything else—desperately, arms pulled close to their chests, eyes tearing—to see something of themselves reflected back at them. And the first High School Musical, when it leapt onto the airwaves in the spring of 2006, combined all of those things in one sugary 90 minute sitting. (As for that last bit, I'm not saying that the denizens of East High with their bright colors and general niceness are at all real, but all kids at one point or another feel alienated and different and many, if not all, secretly want to be a surprise star. Right?) It was a bit of alchemy that is laughable in its obviousness. Why didn't anyone think of this before?

I guess someone sort of did with Grease in the 70's, which, when money is tinkered with and adjusted for inflation, is one of the most successful movies of all time. But Grease featured showtunes where HSM features pop songs. Grease had sex jokes and pregnancy scares while HSM is prêt-à-porter for Evangelical America (the romantic leads don't even kiss in the first one!) The melding of dancing, acting, and singing has made being a triple threat practically necessary in order for a dreamer to become a hero to these bebopping youngs (Generation Z?) Sure Zac Efron, who plays hunky basketball star turned, um, high school musical star Troy Bolton, didn't actually, you know, sing in the first one. But he does now! And he did in Hairspray! You've Kenny Ortega, the film's director (also directed Newsies, swoon) and company to thank for the likes of we-do-it-all! up and comers Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, and Miranda Cosgrove. (Ask your nieces and nephews to whom I'm referring.)

Oh! Hah! So what's the plot? Well the first one, like I said above, is about Troy Bolton, a doe-eyed young b-ball jock who ends up singing a romantic, upbeat poppy karaoke duet with a mysterious chica at a teen New Year's Eve party held at the ski resort where they're both staying over winter break. Then, back in Albuquerque of all places, gasp! There's the girl. Her name is Gabriella Montez and she is a transfer math and science geek. Troy has his sports, Gaby has her nerd stuff and never the twain shall meet. Except there's that nagging memory of singing among snowy peaks... Eventually they both muster up the gumption to audition for the school's spring musicale, much to the displeasure of resident star Sharpay Evans and her twinky (like they seriously go as far to make him gay as they can without having him make out with a dude) brother Ryan. The status quo is rocked—how can a jock sing and dance? how can a nerd sing, dance, and land the hottest boy in school??—and the kids sing a song about breaking out of prescribed high school molds. And, you know, in the end there's romance and everyone gets a part in the musical and whee! Happy! The second one takes place during summer vacation, and they all work at a country club. There's double crossing and a talent show and it's all deeply, deeply silly and not really worth describing other than to say that at one point Zac wanders the desert and sings a plaintive ballad. I'm still sort of laughing and shivering about that one.

The third installment, well who knows! It's got a bigger budget and like 10! new! songs! And it's sure to be a huge hit. You don't have to see it by any means, but I think it's something you should know about lest you become one of those stuffy grownups who forgets how to have mindless fun (other than like getting shitfaced and stuff which is mindless fun but not really all that wholesome. If you watch the movies while getting shitfaced, well you're just about the coolest person ever then, aren't you?) Purists be damned who say that this isn't a real musical because it's just music videos crammed into a thin plot. The success of these bubblegum fantasias allows actual pop and rock-tinged pieces of Art like recent theatrical critical darlings In The Heights and the masterful Passing Strange to find audiences where they might not have before.

So enjoy it or don't, but know that it's not going away without an elaborately-choreographed pop-and-lock dancefight. Nobody puts baby Rent in a corner. Nobody.

What is ACORN??

An evil group that exists to organize poor people into a violent militia and overthrow the government via "voting." Or basically a lobbying group for low- and middle-income families, either one.

Oh no, lobbyists!

Right? ACORN is in some respects a lobbying group like, say, the oil or pharmaceutical lobbies. Except they represent poor people instead of profitable corporations so they're a much less successful lobbying group.

What do they do?

They started as a radical group dedicated to getting welfare recipients and underemployed non-welfare recipients together to demand socialist things like free lunches for kids and emergency room care. Now they lobby Democrats for terrorist things like raising the minimum wage and forcing the government to subsidize affordable housing. Also they organize voter registration drives.

But what about all these crimes they're committing??

ACORN pays local losers in Florida $8 an hour to gather 20 voter registrations a day. So some of these losers are lazy, like all employees, and just make up the registrations. ACORN does try to find these made-up registrations and fire the employees who submit them, but, you know, sometimes they miss a couple. Also the law seems to say that ACORN has to submit all the registrations they gather no matter what, and even though the law is a little bit vague, they're still trying to follow it.

Why do Republicans need to attack and delegitimize a damn voter registration drive??

Because a certain amount of passive voter suppression is built in to the Republican campaign strategy. If all the disenfranchised and disenchanted voters were organized and registered and informed, we'd probably be a crazy socialist 10-party country like Italy or something. The GOP engages in active voter suppression—voter ID laws and legal challenges—and the more passive kind built into the democratic process, like engendering cynicism about the democratic process.

Obviously convincing the guys who disagree with you to not vote is part of any party's campaign strategy, but the GOP's by necessity targets poor people and minorities, and the vast history of suppressing the votes of poor people and minorities is way grosser than any history of disenfranchising white protestants. To us! Maybe you have some totally oppressed landed gentry in your family tree so you may feel differently.

Quite honestly the very heart of the utter bullshitness of this anti-ACORN campaign can be found in one incredibly telling quote from a spokesman for the RNC: "Cairncross accused ACORN of engaging in a 'systematic effort to undermine the election process' through its voter-registration drives." Do you see the problem with that statement?

And basically there is a CERTAIN CLASS of Republican voter that does not think that the poors, the Blacks, the homelesses, and so on honestly really deserve the same power to choose our rulers as a guy who's worked his whole life to get where he is. The politics of resentment are the last, most powerful weapon the McCain campaign has left this cycle. The details of the charges don't matter, actual proof of fraud doesn't matter, any evidence whatsoever of voter fraud being a real problem with a measurable effect on elections certainly doesn't matter, because the "fraud" is just that, you know, no-good hoodlum welfare recipients are being handed voter registration forms, and one type of person sees that as the point of democracy and the other type sees it as an utter perversion of democracy.

Didn't McCain used to totally be in the tank for ACORN?

Well Republicans have been bitching about ACORN and voter fraud for years now, but McCain definitely didn't used to be one of those Republicans. In 2006 McCain did give a keynote address, about immigration rights, at a rally co-sponsored by ACORN.

Can you maybe use a little more false equivalence to explain this in a way I understand?

Sure. ACORN's voter registration drives are to conservatives what Diebold voting machines are the liberals. The possibility of abuse is present and clear, but no one's yet convincingly proved that any abuse has occurred.

OK so what's up with everyone suddenly talking about ACORN?

As we said, nuttier conservatives have been on the ACORN-bashing bandwagon for years now. That it's finally trickled up to Drudge and Fox means they're scared they're losing the election and they need to preemptively delegitimize Obama.

What are my talking points for when crazy relatives argue that ACORN stole the election?

What we're dealing with so far is minor voter registration fraud. The questionable registrations number in the double digits in most states, and most of them have been flagged and caught by either ACORN themselves or election officials. Furthermore in many places the false registrations are required by law to be submitted anyway, so that ACORN isn't guilty of, say, tossing out the forms of Republicans they sign up. They do try to flag the fake ones as fake, but regardless, the fake ones are still being caught. Also: voter registration fraud does not coherently lead to voter fraud, because if you register one man 75 times, how will he vote 75 times, exactly?

More importantly, the election can't be stolen if it hasn't happened yet, and voter registration fraud does not explain in any way a double digit lead for a candidate in national tracking polls. Like, wtf, how are you making this argument, are you slow? ACORN registering Mickey Mouse is why Barack Obama is up 12 in Pennsylvania? Ok, sure, whatever you say.

The Wall Street Journal on what happens now:

Democrats could decide to go ahead with their plan without Republicans. While this would ensure passage, it would essentially saddle Democrats with responsibility for a bailout package that has stirred up strong resistance among both Democrat and Republican voters — with elections just weeks away.
[...]
If Democrats are forced to move forward on their own, the party's demands on the White House are sure to go up. Proposals that once seemed off the table — such as a plan to give bankruptcy judges authority to adjust mortgage terms — would likely gain new life. The prospects would also likely rise for Democratic proposals to stimulate the economy, such as new spending on roads and bridges and extended federal benefits for the unemployed.

But they won't want to do that because the bailout plan is unpopular (depending entirely on how it is explained and described to voters) so they need the support of Congressional Republicans in order to make sure Democrats facing reelection don't have the albatross of bailing out Wall Street around their necks. This close to an election, it's better to be obstructionist (while complaining about a do-nothing congress) than bold.

Roll Call (in a special Friday edition!) on the negotiations:

Senate Republicans are pissed at House Republicans and John McCain, for sabotaging the progress they made:

Senate Budget ranking member Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) said he didn’t know whether the process would break down as a result of House Republicans.

“I certainly hope that rational minds will take control of the process on both sides,” Gregg said. “The problem isn’t hypothetical. It’s real.”

House Fanancial Services committee ranking Republican Spencer Bachus has now pissed off everyone because he acceded to the Dodd/Frank compromise and went to their little press conference and then he announced that House Republicans were rebelling. He was forced to put out a statement announcing that even though he was the ranking Republican involved in the negotiations, he did not represent House Republicans.

Congress will probably be in session through the weekend, though the Senate's schedule is "murky." They still have to pass "a continuing resolution, a stimulus bill and the bailout." Democrats might sneak the bailout into the CR, though that is a last resort move. Probably no votes today on anything.

Mark Ambinder on whether this is McCain's fault.

Yes and no. He didn't say a damn word to anyone during the Cabinet Room meeting. So he didn't bring up the John Boehner/House Republicans plan, and he didn't attack the Paulson deal. He is "urging all sides to come together."

But Boehner and the White House — and McCain — if they want to get something passed — do have the responsibility to persuade these Republicans to support the bailout .

After all, if not to get these recalcitrant Republicans on board, why did McCain go to Washington in the first place?

So he's doing nothing, at all, except providing political cover to Republicans who don't want to vote for this.

[H]er family name rhymes with "Miss America Pie's Chevy to the levee"

Glamourpuss [Forbes]

Earlier: Gawker Explainer: Even More Names in the News

The prevalent way of pronouncing her name around these parts seems to be KAHV-yuh VISH-wah-NAH-thon, with the strongest emphasis in the last name on the first syllable, if that makes sense. People were using all sorts of random pronunciations when the story first broke, but that's what's been settled on after consultation with various Indian-American kids.

And no doubt they cribbed the answer from some slightly older Irish chick.

Earlier: Gawker's coverage of Kaavya Viswanathan.

• The Atlantic's William Lang-uh-vee-shuh.
• The New Yorker's Jim Suhr-wick-ee.
• Time's James Pahn-uh-wah-zick.
• Times book critic Mitch-uh-coe Cock-uh-tahn-ee.

Earlier:
Gawker Explainer: Names in the News
Gawker Explainer: More Names in the News
Gawker Explainer: Even More Names in the News
Related:
Archive Search: Langewiesche [Atlantic]
Archive Search: Surowiecki [TNY]
Archive Search: James Poniewozik [Time]
Archives Search: Kakutani [NYT]

• Nadine Hay-ahbsh.
• Andrew Crew-cough.
• Tom Sko-kuh.
• Jeff Burr-KO-vuh-see.
• Corky Shuh-mosh-ko.

Earlier:
Gawker Explainer: Names in the News
Gawker Explainer: More Names in the News
Related:
Gawker's coverage of Nadine Haobsh
Gawker's coverage of Andrew Krucoff
Tom Scocca's Media Mob [NYO]
Jeff Bercovici's Memo Pad [WWD]
Archive search for Siemaszko [NYDN]

• Elizabeth Spy-ers.
• Ah-too-sah Rubenstein.
• Laurel Toe-bee.
• Lola Oh-gun-ah-key.

Earlier:
Gawker Explainer: Names in the News
Gawker's coverage of Elizabeth Spiers
Gawker's coverage of Atoosa Rubenstein
Gawker's coverage of Laurel Touby
Gawker's coverage of Lola Ogunnaike