This comes the same day Huffington Post noted that FOF is laying off another two hundred employees, about a fifth of its workforce, just in time for the holidays. This is the fourth or fifth FOF layoff in the last two years. Apart from dropping half a million dollars on Prop 8, FOF says its own retail arm (yes they do, primarlily online) has been hurt by discounters like WalMart and other online stores. So it's not just about putting Christ in Christmas, it's a marketing decision, too.

From Editor and Publisher, via TPM: "Local Newspapers Cover Rising Number of Racist Anti-Obama Actions in Small Towns."

Congratulations on your contribution to racial harmony.

Those buying into this are either on the right like Slate, who comfort themselves that the "good," white people voted for McCain, or on the left like Salon, who hold white men responsible for all the evil in the country, making two equally noxious mirror-image groups. Everyone in the progressive camp knew from the beginning it would take a coalition of color, sex and ethnography to elect an intelligent politician, and all those who support the coalition are equally worthy of praise, all the more if they go against their dominant culture. I gagged on whitey-hating liberalism, which usually also means self-hate, when I was younger than Alex is now.

He never felt anything that he didn't analyze to death.

Delayed emotional reaction isn't a bad thing. It protects you from overreaction, and gives you time to analyze deeply. The short answer, though, is to move on with confidence in yourself, and to hell with the others. Don't worry about your reaction. It's normal. Violent overreaction, no matter how dramatic, is not. We don't live in a movie.

The mood and tone, what gets funded and doesn't, what's in and who's out. The Clinton(s) failure, along with their inability to support a business and foreign policy vision that differentiated them from NixonReaganBush, was the lack of an artistic vision that built the country as that of the Sixties and even the last half of the Forties and Fifties had done, instead continuing the legacy and prefiguring Bush II. Instead of immortal art, music and film we got Piss Christ, an elephant dung Madonna and aped the British conception of Art Wot Looks Like Piles o'Shit. We've had a forty year poverty of ideas. I'm hoping for better in the future on all fronts.

Have to say, to counter some of the early sneers, I'm definitely an ex-Salon fan and this made me laugh, mostly. The Olberman joke was characteristically lame, and HRC really should do something to distinguish herself in the Senate before trying for higher office. What about Joan Walsh, though? After facing the disappointment that she's really not going to get her own MSNBC show, she devotes herself to good works among those unfortunates in the Heartland. And a long stint in journalism school.

Is it Delawareans or Delawarites? Delaweenians was never in it.

Prior to his deployment to Iraq, Beau Biden served as Delaware's Attorney General. He's smart, well-spoken and ridiculously popular with female political activists. One case of a political dynasty that should be enouraged.

A poster on Steve Benen's Washington Monthly column just asked "....where are all those people who posted here four years ago, arguing that the democrats should give up on the south completely?" I told him they were all over at Salon, reading Thomas Schaller.

Anderson is pretty much forgotten except by other writers, which is a shame. As Bayard notes in the first paragraph, Anderson's modern style, the first departure from Henry James, and concern with "ordinary" Americans prefigured just about all the better known writers of the twentieth century. His contemporaries were less Hemingway and Faulkner than H.L. Mencken and Ben Hecht.

This book seems to tread the line between fiction and nonfiction so closely that I wasn't sure just from reading the review whether it was a novel or not. (It is.) I know I'd rather read a historical work with real figures novelized into it Gore Vidal-style than one full of "fictional" characters whose identity you're supposed to guess at, the way Harold Robbins made so much money and still destroyed his career.

This sounds like a reader, something for the days after the election. Its tone reminds me of "Big Trouble," the classic of western murder whose author, Anthony Lukas, figured tragically in Bayard's last review, "Blue Genes." "Big Trouble" is a horribly long but totally compelling book. I hope this one is the same, only a little more concise. Any book you kill yourself over can't be called a total success.

Most popular story on the Huffington Post: John McCain pushed (that is shoved) a woman in a wheelchair. Not down a flight of stairs, but into the wall of a Congressional hallway because she irritated him. This after he reportedly pulled back his hand to strike her, then thought better of it. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/07/report-mccain-pushed-woma_n_124615.html

Fiction just can't keep up, notwithstanding that Koch is approximately as crazy as Giuliani, though both seem somewhat normal next to McCain. Lucky New York. Lucky country. Most of the people who have been on the receiving end of McNasty's temper have been Republicans, and the woman in the wheelchair was the mother of a POW-MIA, not exactly a screaming liberal. You'd think they'd wise up.

As for Widmark, he was not only a great actor (AA nomination for Tommy Udo) but a Democrat and a liberal. His film credits included Judgement at Nuremburg, Cheyenne Autumn and the atomic end-of-the-world fable The Bedford Incident, which he also produced. Wonder how he'd like being compared to Giuliani, let alone McCain.

Oh, no, I'm not....

Short answer to your headline: no. Add your own expletive.