Yesterday was Election Day here in Wisconsin, and as usual I spent the day working as the chief election inspector for City of Madison Wards 18 and 21. As I mentioned last month, I was looking forward to this election because it was the first in which we would get to use the new tabulators recently purchased by the city, and it was just as exciting ( Read more... )

In all the excitement over the elections in my former home state of Virginia, I forgot to mention the big political news from one of my other former home states. On Tuesday, the Illinois legislature passed a marriage equality bill; when Governor Pat Quinn signs it on November 20, Illinois will become the 15th state to legalize same-sex marriage. ( Read more... )

A few years ago I saw this phrase at the liberal political commentary site Balloon Juice: "Conservatism can never fail; it can only be failed." In other words, when a conservative fails to win elective office, or a program enacted by conservative legislators fails to work, the problem, according to conservatives, is always that the politician or ( Read more... )

A few days ago, my brother posted an article on his Facebook wall about the difficulties faced by former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Jim Wright when he tried to get a photo ID card that would allow him to vote in today's elections in Texas, which recently enacted an extremely strict new law requiring voters to present a photo ID ( Read more... )

I finished Mark Leibovich's This Town last night. Its portrait of the symbiotic relationship between parasitical political figures and journalists -- symbiotic in that they support and strengthen each other, and parasitic in that they both feed off the same host, the Federal government -- is pretty appalling, but it's not something I didn't already ( Read more... )

I feel like I should write something about the government shutdown, because I have quite a few friends who have been thrown out of work as a result and because I myself used to work for the Federal government. But in fact I find myself with little to say, other than that the reactionary idiots in the House of Representatives' Republican caucus ( Read more... )

UPDATE! As I've gotten deeper into Words of Wonder, I have indeed run across a handful of instances where the level was unsolvable, which you'll recall was a problem for which I had criticized certain bubble saga games. For example, I ran across a level in which I was required to clear two X tiles from the board, but only one X tiles appeared on ( Read more... )

Since I used Women's Equality Day to look back at the number of women who were serving in the U.S. Senate when I started working there in 1992, I figured I'd do something similar today, the anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

I watched a really funny, really depressing movie last night: In the Loop, a political satire set in the days immediately preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It's funny because, well, it features funny people like David Rasche and Steve Coogan saying and doing funny things. It's depressing because it dramatizes -- comedizes? -- a rather depressing ( Read more... )