My daughters were born in 1992 and 1994. In '92 we were living in Idaho, of all places; in '94, Ann Arbor. My wife breastfed them both pretty much on demand, in the car, in restaurants, theaters, parties. She was discreet but not furtive and for damn sure never acted ashamed. The only time I can remember anyone commenting at all was in Ann Arbor, where an archetypical Ann Arbor type came up and gushed about how fortunate we were to live in Ann Arbor where people were so tolerant and open-minded. Just like the folks in northern Idaho.

What's the big deal? To anyone but adolescent boys, I mean. Crying babies are a hundred times more disruptive than nursing babies. So are running-amok toddlers, both the charming ones and the other kind. I find all babies distracting. I like to make faces at them. But I don't bother anyone when they're eating, not even a baby.

Fundamentalists of the Falwell-Robertson-Haggard ilk have to be behind this. Can there be any lingering doubt that they're really against sexuality of any kind, including babies?

all the characters with surnames are named for first-rank mathematicians (Pascal, Hilbert, Mittag-Leffler, Cayley) or pioneering scientists or artists whose work is explicitly mathematical (Eiffel (whose graceful tower was expected to fall down immediately), Crick (the DNA double helix), Escher (perspective, tiling the plane), Mercator (projection mappings)). I don't know why.

If the Democrats can win in the Confederacy without compromising progressive principles, well and good. But one suspects that Mr. Kilgore really means that those principles should be compromised, most probably to conform to the DLC-Republican Lite template we already have.

Baloney.

Let's not forget the Right-Wingers' end game. A 30-second commercial featuring a blonde bimbo reminding Harold Ford to "call me" knocked Ford down by 5 points in the last weeks of a tight race. And, unlike Barack Hussein Obama, Republican flacks and talk-radio hosts couldn't mangle any of Ford's names into those of the very men we've all been coached to fear and loathe over the past several years.

None of that should matter, of course, but it will, especially if the race is close. It will matter especially to the moronic "swing voter" who devotes less attention to choosing his candidate than to choosing his beer. Can we risk it?

Maybe the hateful Reagan-Watt-Meese-Weinberger-North-Limbaugh-Bush-Quayle-Gingrich-Armey-Delay-O'Reilly-Bush-Cheney era is really passing, and after a cycle or two the possibility of a Republican in the White House will be merely bad, not catastrophic. For sure, Obama's a good man, but he could use more experience, especially campaigning. His opponents won't always self-destruct. Let's let him wait, maybe win an election against a credible opponent, before passing him the torch.

Herbert Hoover doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same thought as Bush. Hoover was a well-accomplished man; he'd been a world class mining engineer, then amazed everyone by his management of post-war famine relief in Belgium. Conspicuously unlike Bush, he listened to and followed the advice of the best experts. It was bad advice, but he was in good company, including the Federal Reserve, which contracted the money supply, and the Congress, whose idea of helpful legislation was the Smoot-Hawley tariffs.

More important, Hoover meant well. Unlike Bush.

You've gotta admit, Tony's a lot more fun than Scotty was.

She's 'way too attractive to be Dick's daughter. Hmmm. . .

I was just thinking that mid-April has consistently been unkind to the good guys. Jesus was crucified about then; FDR died on the 12th, Lincoln was killed on the 14th, Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah building on the 19th, Adolf Hitler was born on the 20th.

And, as Tom T. just reminded me, Bush announced to the world that he's the Decider on the 18th.

I think Joe would be more interested if he could be the Israeli ambassador to the UN.

In 1999, long before the primary season, the GOP put all its chips on George Bush, radically changing the perception of Bush from feckless village idiot to irresistible village idiot. It was all marketing, hawking the notions of unanimity and inevitability. There was nothing special about Bush; just about any empty suit would have worked. (McCain was a gadfly, what the English call window-dressing; if he didn't exist he would have had to be invented.) The press bought in, and that was that.

I have my misgivings about both Hillary and Barack (I'm for Gore, otherwise Edwards), but maybe the same dynamic would work for us. Get behind somebody, anybody, unanimously and early, and let the drumbeat begin.

Sidney Blumenthal, like lots of other people, see Bush's stubborn determination to continue the war as a fertile field for Freud. But there's a very simple explanation, firmly rooted in good common sense. If there's no war, the Addington/Yoo theory of the "unitary executive" no longer protects him. No war, no commander-in-chief; no commander-in-chief, as a mere President he must obey the Constitution. Including things like responding to subpoenas from Henry Waxman and plaintiffs like the ACLU. Avoiding such disclosures has been the number one priority of his administration since Day One.

As long as there's a war, he has a theory that will permit him to stonewall the Congress and possibly (probably) even the Supreme Court, holding off the investigations until the end of his term.

What worries me is what happens then? Does he think he can afford to leave the White House when his Democratic replacement wants to move in?