Comment at the Vanity Fair website on the new Perry revelation:

Something less offensive, for example literally anything, would have played better with the coveted not-racist demographic.

The latest news about the reconciliation discussion is just lovelily ironic, though I'm sure things won't play out this way: apparently, to qualify for simple-majority status (or anyway 50 + Biden) a Senate bill has to have a significant money-saving impact on the budget--i.e. raise taxes or result in spending cuts--and nothing on the table does ( Read more... )

I like how Daily Kos is breaking down their commissioned opinion polls by region lately. I wish they'd go further and get the numbers for Deep South whites (LA, AL, MS, GA, SC ... maybe Arkansas and Tenn.?). Time to focus this scorn ( Read more... )

Scalia's father was a Dante scholar. I learned this trying to find out when his parents died, as a possible indication of when he will. Allegedly there's a 1 in 3 chance a conservative justice will die during Obama's first term. All I've been able to dig up is they died around 1986, when he was fifty. So maybe seventy-five or so? He's 73. As is ( Read more... )

I'm not very happy about the Palin business, and I'll use folksy metaphors to explain why not. She was much more dangerous as a vice presidential candidate. Palin's like a dog whistle or something, her 'folksiness' works only on the biologically predisposed - I suspect she'd have been a wonderful lightning rod, keeping the nomination away from ( Read more... )

Things I still can't believe:

1. That they got away with calling it the Patriot Act.

There aren't enough shoes in the world.

No. 44, they're calling him. The Mysterious Stranger? I've had at least three southern grad students (!) tell me there's something indefinably frightening or untrustworthy about him. Not that he was black, liberal, Muslim, smart, but that something was wrong. Which pretty neatly became my opinion about them, of course. The narrator of No. 44 comes ( Read more... )

We woke up at dawn to be a part of it. Our district is majority black, a sort of suspicious, determined optimism reigned. I got into the building and sent my Canadian to nap in the car just as the rain started in earnest. Took almost three hours, but when we came home from errands c. noon the line was much shorter.

Warm bright leafy autumn day, two nights in a row of close to normal sleep, Obama shirt on my back and sticker on my car, the gnosis that he'll win and that test dissolving into the past. On CNN, Soledad O'Brien in the sun looking beautiful and blissful and forgetful of whatever news is at hand. She can't hide it, she's right where I am.