LEADING QUESTIONS, PART 1: THE MYSTERY CHART

Enjoying those playoffs? How could you not when someone just springs up out of nowhere and decides to start kissing baseballs?? After all, two national pastimes...here combined for all to see, and creating equal quantities of romance and enmity.

But let's not get bogged down with such passing moments of frivolity and furor. We want to give you something to think about, as opposed to the standard knee-jerk that's seemingly de rigueur in our society these days, where three debates can compromise (hell, even Midasize) a political process sorely in need of a refund.

Perhaps the American people can ask for a "windfall super-PAC tax" to be levied retroactively--and in equal measure--on the donors (those increasingly interventionist billionaires) and the recipients (the suddenly cash-bloated media). The amount of money being thrown around in this election process is at least as shameless as Al Alburquerque's baseball buss, and if some of it could be plowed back into the economy in the form of work projects we might figure out just what's wrong with all those WAR systems.

But let's leave behind the pols with their knee-buckling millions. Instead, here's a little something that we've taken to calling the mystery chart. That's right, we're so confident that y'all are brilliantined enough to figure out exactly what this collection of numbers represents that we're going to post it here without so much as a syllable of explanation--at least for now.

We'll just say that it's a new and different way to look at some data that's not quite reached its full "ad placement potential" as yet, but that we'll be able to saturate you with over the next week as we wait to see whether "The Kissing Bandido" will be running up against some overly aggressive "debate tactics" in his next smoochfest on the mound.