I just realized that I'm smarter than I think I am. And those who know me well will have to pick their jaws up off the floor, because they know how smart I think I am. Hell, think? Call it a clear-eyed, cold-steel assessment of things-as-they-are. I KNOW I'm bloody well smart. So... Smarter than THAT, even? Okay, I'm not mapping any neural pathways, splitting any subatomic particles, explicating string theory or fractal geometry any time soon. I do know my limitations. But I've just bec...

There is something highly significant about the emergence of body weight, attitudes about weight, the science and conventional wisdom of weight management, etc. as the topic du jour (or du weekend?) on DU. It is clearly laden with emotional baggage for a great many of us. Maybe it's the 'methadone' substitute for the flame-war junkies whose addictions were stoked so abundantly by 'the Hillary thing' and various other controversies now rendered moot or robbed of their relevance. We do love our...

>>The reason for that is clear. Almost everyone has a great need to think of him or herself as a good person. Slavery was a brutal system that dehumanized its victims. How can a person think of himself as a good person when he brutalizes and dehumanizes other people for economic gain? The only way to do that is to tell yourself and make yourself believe that those whom you dehumanize are barely human to start with. Those were the attitudes that prevailed in the U.S. South during the slaver...

...in the issues and ideals. You convey the sense of wonder and joy at the feelings of inadequacy, etc. rising up and going away, very eloquently. I think many people have experienced something similar when they've overcome a challenge or surmounted a great obstacle. Please believe this: I will never stop fighting for the rights of you and my sister and my friends and other family members to have every support our society gives to every pair of consenting adults who commit to one another for...

I really think that the vile and bigoted ballot measures passed denying civil rights to gay people in several states are the beginning of the end. Yes, I really believe that, ultimately, states allowing this crap to be pulled are paving the way to a national civil rights act that will include gender identity and sexual orientation. In other words: There is good news and bad news to be read in these pathetic attempts to institutionalize fear, homophobia and oppression. The good news: I think...

We owed you sanity. We owed you a thoughtful, intelligent leader to interact with. We owed you an Administration that will listen with respect and make decisions on a larger basis than "how will this play to the semi-hominid wing of my political party?" We owed you a nation that is ready to interact on an adult basis. To speak eloquently for our interests and express our opinions with clarity and passion, but equally to look beyond our interests, and to take the opinions of others into consi...

Howard Dean, M.D. Chair Democratic National Committee 430 South Capitol Street SE Washington, DC 20003 28 October, 2008 Dear Dr. Dean Let me lead off with profound gratitude to you for your leadership of the Democratic Party. A lifelong Democrat, I was disappointed and alienated by the direction our leadership took in the 1990s, and I became essentially a “sleeping Democrat”—reliable Democratic voter, but not much else in respect to the Party. Your determination to return control of the Pa...

I just got back to Santa Fe from the second of two political rallies by major-party Presidential candidates in Albuquerque today. This morning, Albuquerque was honored with a visit by John McCain, with spouse Cindy in tow. According to the Albuquerque Journal, "McCain's Albuquerque stop is an attempt to blunt Obama in the voter-rich metropolitan area where the Democrat was backed by 51 percent of voters, according to a poll commissioned by the Albuquerque Journal." Also according to that orga...

America is getting bigger. Our heroes are getting bigger. Lieutenant Ehren Watada. Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan. And, yes, Barack Obama. People who want to keep America small—small as their sad, vengeful little deities—are still around, mad and scared and loudly asserting the empty talking points that inflated their sense of importance. But the echo chamber has been turned off and their voices are sounding shrill and tinny. They’re still trying to whip up hate and fear about Scary Brown Peop...

"OMG.... So sorry! We never should have said, 'Barack Hussein Obama!' It was terribly inappropriate to say 'Hussein,' as in, 'Barack Hussein Obama.' We TOTALLY apologize for saying 'Barack Hussein Obama!' That was very bad of us." "Seriously. We never should have said 'Hussein,' as in, 'Barack Hussein Obama.' We will tell everyone associated with our campaign that they must never refer to our opponent as 'Barack Hussein Obama,' only as 'Barack Obama.' No 'Hussein.' Really." "In the fu...

Or perhaps that should be "A Supramodest" proposal. In that what I'm suggesting is not small in any way, except insofar as it doesn't involve saving the bloated assets of the greedheads whose bacchanalian raid on the economy got us here. My proposal is based on the following non-negotiable assumptions: 1. We do need a financial and credit infrastructure. Devolving back to a gold-based currency and/or a cash/barter basis economy is not a viable solution. There are billions of dollars in ass...

...and this time the crash-and-tinkle can be heard around the world. They are trying to make just one, last, titanic smash-and-grab raid on the U.S. taxpayer. They have finally grasped the fact that the party is over, their room has been rented, checkout time is firm and imminent, and no one is going to give them an extension. The audacity of their demand ("Seven hundred billion, NOW! Or the Economy GETS IT... We're not kidding!") is a measure of the impunity their previous raids enjoyed: ...

Here's the deal: Think of our great nation <-----(note patriotic, Country-First type italics!) as a car. No, a minivan. Yeah, that's real all-American. A minivan. Nice one. With all the options including the DVD player and the refrigerator/drinks dispenser. Beautiful, complicated machine, top-of-the-line, including V-8 engine, mag wheels, dual carbs, the works. We, the passengers, get to ride in it. We don't know exactly where we're going, or how we're getting there, but we get to ho...

Apropos this wonky little observation from Seth Colter Walls on the Huffington Post site: (Link) This gave me a big, fat, "ah-HAAA!!!" moment. I have been mystified by the polls reporting a McCain lead for a number of reasons, and by the apparent despondency among Obama supporters in response to those reports for one simple reason. Let me explain: The polls have been mystifying me because as far as I can tell, the addition of Palin to the GOPpie ticket, for all the noise it's generated, doe...

Just a guess about which books Sarah wanted the Wasilla librarian to remove from the shelves... Please, feel free to download, copy, and use. (Image) helpfully, Bright (edited to make one teeny-tiny change in her jewelry...)

I got the pics my friend D sent today. Here's where they started out in the morning, near Mickey's Diner (which is, as D notes, an obligatory "establishing shot" for any film or TV episode shot in St. Paul.) As you can see, Bob Fletcher's goons are already bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. (Image) A closeup of Jane Hamsher and Glen Greenwald in the intersection near Mickey's: (Image) Jane trying to get an angle on the action, and Fletcher's goons not-too-subtly blocking the shot. Classy, real cla...

Yes, she scares the willies out of me. But my vote tends to be based on concrete realities, rather than what George Lakoff calls "the realities of the political mind." I find this HuffPo article he put up today very convincing: (Link) A couple of quotes: But the Palin nomination is not basically about external realities and what Democrats call "issues," but about the symbolic mechanisms of the political mind -- the worldviews, frames, metaphors, cultural narratives, and stereotypes. The Rep...

...and I thought her experiences might be of interest here. My friend, D, is a lawyer with a small firm headquartered in downtown St. Paul. Her 20-year-old daughter, A, works in one of the big downtown hotels. She got up a some ungodly cowmilking hour to get A to work so she could supply coffee to all the GOPpie bigwigs and Old Media fatcats, I think (though she didn't cop to this) partly because she had "Mom worries" about her kid biking or busing down there with all the foofooraw rumored to...

...because I was a 17-year-old girl once, and it was an unremittingly painful experience. Even without a pregnancy. I made a lot of mistakes as a 17-year-old. Some of them I knew at the time were mistakes, and (more or less) blew them off. Some I didn't realize were mistakes until later in life, when I looked at how they restricted my options and had bitter regrets. I got over it and moved on and my life has been pretty successful, but if you asked me which year of my life I most would cons...

What more is there to say? The tears are rolling down my face. I believe we will, yes we will, turn to the future and restore our nation. Hey... if that staffer I met the other day sees this... hey, Dude-- Tell your boss, willya? Tell him again. From me. Thank you. Just... thank you.

...and I have a livestream feed from the DNC there open in another window. (Thanks, nice guy from Seattle in the BigTent who helped me download and configure the plug-ins to make it possible!) Being crowd-phobic sucks rocks. I started to head over to Invesco. There were what looked like millions of people streaming there over the footbridge, there were buses and shuttles everywhere and in the distance I saw the gigantic crowds... I chickened. I went back to the Big Tent and gave my credent...

She's very pleasant, very focused, and very pleased that her opponent is facing an escalating cascade of lawsuits from employees and issues about returning campaign contributions. For those who haven't been following Florida politics, she's campaigning for Katherine Harris's old district. Woo-hoo! On to victory, Christine! I told her that there were many politically active Floridians on DU and she had her PR person note down the DU name for future research, so don't be surprise if we hear fr...

One: You go where the power is. Not the political power-- the A/C access that will keep you from depleting your laptop batteries. By the middle of the afternoon, power strips are at a premium and the jockeying for a spot where you can see a monitor or a platform, not get fallen over every ninety seconds, and plug in your 'pute gets pretty fierce. Two: Fortunately, most bloggers are young. Because if we were all old farts like me, we'd be making a lot of chiropractors rich. The combined ef...

I'm in the Big Tent. Senator Schumer (and entourage) just strolled by and sat down across from me. Really! I'm across from a gaggle of Kos bloggers, and there was an empty space on the sofa, and he just parked himself here for a chat: (Image) He's upbeat about the Senate chances. His current count is: Five definite takeovers of GOPpie seats; three could go either way (I pricked up my ears when I heard him rank Minnesota in that group... he thinks Al Franken is regaining lost ground and th...

Shout-Outs: The kind, KIND Denverite (and Wisconsin expat) who overtook me walking to Pepsi Center and gave me a squirt of sunblock, thus averting sunburn of skin-cancer levels. The blogger from HispanicTips.com who sat opposite me in the Blogger's Dungeon and provided the mot juste to describe the physical condition we all suffer from by the end of a long day: "Blogger's Butt." And most of all, our very own DUer Librechik, who gave me a terrific thrill by coming into the Blogger's Dungeon t...

Everyone is going nuts. And everyone wants Joe Biden's Mom to make more campaign appearances for him. Did you guys catch that? The camera focused on her when he told that little story about Mama telling him, when he got beat up by a big kid, to "go back and bloody his nose so you can walk down the street tomorrow" and caught her turning to the person sitting next to her. You could read her lips: "I did. I did tell him that!" Wow... more later! We've got to start the long and arduous proc...

...and I'm still at the Pepsi Center. Or BACK at the Pepsi Center, with The World's Most Wonderful Human Being. Elad & Hissyspit were going to the meetup-- I wanted to go too, but the chance to see Bill Clinton and Joe Biden speak was a strong inducement to continue my bloggerly duties tonight. Elad generously donated the other Hall Pass and I invited Himself "Oh boy, come along! We'll get a chance to actually see everything and stuff..." I am mildly crowd-phobic. Himself isn't phobic but he r...

...if Hurricane Gustav heads for land rated above Category Two. A gent from the News Hour just dropped off the release; Nagin just did an interview with them and he's flying back to Louisiana tonight. Here's the URL to the News Hour coverage: (Link) Quote: "Unfortunately all the models right now-- we've looked at three or four of them. They update them every couple hours-- they all point toward New Orleans so that's an unfortunate development. It's going to be a Category 3 storm at least,...

The screams of "AYE!" when the chair called for the voice vote were deafening. The floor is now a mess of dancing, applauding people. I'm quite pleased that they let my home state get in the second-to-the-last word so that our delegates could give the litany of Dem pols and notables on national TV. What the delegate giving the speech said is true-- New Mexico WILL go blue in 2008 and it WILL be because of our Hispanic and Native American votes.

MY home state, New Mexico, yielded the floor to Illinois, which yielded the floor to New York. They're letting HILLARY cast the votes! HUGE ovation... Smart, smart lady... that albatross is NOT gonna hang around her neck if she can do anything about it. She's asking for the suspension of the rules and selection by acclamation! GREAT political theater. The Blogger's Dungeon erupts with applause. The ovations on the floor are just going on and on.