because of the wide distance between what "family" and "marriage" mean in America today and what people like to believe they meant in some ideal past, up there on Walton's Mountain.

Maybe a strong, unapologetic gay or lesbian who's raising one or more children with a committed life partner needs to run for the U.S. Senate somewhere and point these things out. I'd stuff envelopes for such a candidate!

On the other hand, maybe we all need to just shut up about who does or doesn't have a model family and elect leaders who walk the walk--fund Head Start, universal child health care, all that dull non-Biblical stuff.

(1) Succotash, which is one of the few foods I grew up eating in New England I think is worth bragging about.

(2) New Brunswick stew, which I discovered when I moved to North Carolina, and which is awesome as a side (cf. Bullock's in Durham) or as a main course.

...and of course fresh lima beans are pretty nice sautéed or in a stir fry. It sounds as though the author of this book focused on dried beans.

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' "Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"

"But `glory' doesn't mean `a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again.

"They've a temper, some of them -- particularly verbs, they're the proudest -- adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs -- however, I can manage the whole lot!

Every voter was a white male. The story of the U.S. electorate is the story of the expansion of voting rights first within and then beyond this group. The acquisition of voting rights tends to follow the acquisition of other things, such as economic power and social status.

Since the founding of the Republic, therefore, white males have always had voting rights. Relative to other groups, they have almost always had superior social status and economic power as well. When their economic and social hegemony has declined relative to other groups, the American WM has responded in different ways depending on his level of education and location (southern or non-coastal western vs. northern, midwestern or coastal western; rural vs. urban). The rising tide of American economic growth has lifted white males along with everyone else in some areas (the northeast, e.g.), but not in others (the rural south, e.g.).

Urban or non-southern/western white males with a college education simply cease to exist as a discrete voting bloc; they tend to vote like non-white non-males with similar levels of education in similar locations. It's not all white males that are a solid "NASCAR" voting bloc, only the ones that live in parts of the country where special circumstances--the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, e.g.--have prevented anyone from rising very far. The end of segregation and the destruction of whatever pubic educational system that existed in the rural south (not much) through white flight left the so-called NASCAR bloc feeling left behind, besieged, and disempowered. This may be a fiction, but it's the one that many so-called Bubbas live by--guns and big, loud trucks make up for the women and the non-white folks taking our historical place in the power structure.

Long story short, the average NASCAR voter is living a different reality than the rest of us. There is no reason to pander to them because the appeals to testosterone and chronic feelings of victimhood that seem to be necessary when addressing them as a group are inconsistent with the kinds of things that progressives are trying to accomplish: a national agenda of mutual tolerance and shared purpose.

What's the statute of limitations for dissertion from a National Guard Unit and complicity in the same?

"'Teens are creating new forms of social behavior that blur the distinction between online and real-world interactions, the presentation says."

Sounds like someone in the Pentagon has read Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game."

OK, I'll take the flame-bait. Maryland and Delaware were BOTH slave states at the time of the Constitutional Convention. Now this is where you enlighten the rest of us about what you mean by only four states being "officially' slave states at the time. And which kind of propaganda do YOU prefer to the kind that opposes the current oligarchy?

is being peddled in Iowa by the GOP alpha males. The three that Shapiro writes about are doing well because a certain segment of our population yearns for an authoritarian father-figure who confirms their own sense of repressed shame. If this were not the case, Huckabee and Romney would be doing better than they are, since they're living embodiments of "good dads." The voters whose cognitive dissonance Shapiro pinpoints see them as weak. To such people the child beater you know is preferable to the big scary world out there you don't know. The past philanderings of Giuliani, McCain and Thompson are part of their appeal for such people, who are reassured by a president/parent to whom the rules don't apply (like the current disaster).

The pathology that drives this segment of the electorate has determined the course of American politics since 1968 at least.