Mr. Schaller --

<<Joe Scarborough followed shortly thereafter and made an astute point: You do not put a bill on the floor of this significance without certainty that you have the votes lined up. “All of this happened because Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and the Democratic majority did not know how to count.” I’m sorry folks, but Scarborough is right. And he’s also right that Pelosi scolding the Republicans right before the vote was stupid. Get the votes first, and then make your political points about the failed ideology of deregulation.>>

Has it not occurred to you that perhaps Nancy Pelosi did not WANT this bill to pass? That she may have wanted the Democrats to be seen as the party of trying to get things done and work things out and make the tough choices, all the while aware of the fact that this bill's failure does nothing but help Obama? Not to mention, as another poster mentioned, setting up a table full of stripes v. solids on which Obama can come in, be seen to have facilitated the NEXT deal (the one that does get passed), and thus to be the hero that McCain so desperately wanted and so miserably failed to be? Because if such a possibility hasn't occurred to you, it should have.

At the very least, when you find yourself agreeing with Joe Scarborough, you might want to go back and check your scratch work.

Once again.

Um, Mr. Schaller... Do you read Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com? 'Cause he's covered the ups and downs of the Bradley Effect (and its opposite in some states) pretty heavily.

Might want to check it out.

Surprisingly, quite a bit.

Those of us in other creative fields like music, writing, and filmmaking and even video game development also have to deal with this current trend toward consumer-created content. It's difficult and even painful to cope with, because while most of us applaud the idea that anyone can and should be creative, asserting further that consumer-created content is superior simply because it is consumer-created is offensive to those of us who have spent years training and practicing our craft in order to actually be good at it. (As Brad Bird put it in "Ratatouille," "Anyone can cook -- but not anyone can be a master chef.")

This misguided but viral notion, that what this world needs more of is stuff made/done by people with no serious knowledge of the task in question, has of course invaded our politics as well (although I'm told that it's been doing so to some degree ever since William Henry Harrison sold himself as a man of the people in the 1840s). Which brings us, of course, to the recent comments by the Sarahcudda in which she averred as how Joe SixPack deserves to see an average American in the Vice Presidency.

Perhaps now that real, live journalists seeing their industry tossed in the air like a Boggle board are starting to notice the ramifications in such an environment for them, they'll begin to turn a more skeptical eye to Up-with-Everyman!pronouncements from Governor Mooseburger and her ilk. This society needs to be slapped in the face and reminded that there is, in fact, an advantage to having specialists do specialized work -- one which outweighs distinctly any disadvantages. My neurosurgeon may be a Harvard-name-dropping, Lexus-driving, merlot-sipping elitist, but I'll take him fiddling with my axons and dendrites over Larry the Cable Guy, thank you very much.

Because it's a freakin' loser, that's why. The point here is clearly not to try to make hay over a twenty-year-old financial scandal ('cause those ALWAYS go over like gangbusters!), but rather to intimidate the McCain campaign into shutting the hell up out of fear of bringing all that crap up again. To call it Mutually Assured Destruction is to misstate the case, because nobody's going to get destroyed -- somebody has to win this thing, and if the numbers get frozen where they are due to reciprocated fire, Obama wins.

Gore and Kerry (and maybe Dukakis and even Mondale) lost because they listened to people like Mark Ambinder, their good friends in the press who only had their best interests at heart, when they urged them to turn the other cheek. Poppycock. Obama's from Chicago, and he knows the only way to beat the GOP: They pull a knife, you pull a gun; they send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue. THAT'S the Chicago way, and THAT's the way you're gonna beat McCain.

And if you can't take the punches, go watch the rest of the fight in the bar with the other delicate flowers. This shit is TOO DAMN IMPORTANT.

Here endeth the lesson.

Apology accepted.

Without question, the stupidest article I have ever read on Salon. And I've been reading Salon for over ten years.

I'd really like to see the editor who approved this be forced to defend its publication.

Saxby Chambliss is dumb as a brick, and will burn in hell for what he did to Max Cleland.

Welcome, Cyrus, to the wonderful, irrational world of game publishers and their legal departments.

#4 -- because I love fantasy as much as anybody.

Apology accepted. (Ain't no zealot like a convert, I guess.)

Technological changes are all well and good, but it seems worth pointing out that the periods of time Lind is discussing here (72 years) also correspond roughly to the average human lifespan (or, if you prefer, two prime-of-life adult lifespans of 36 years each, which may be just as useful for the purposes of this discussion). No sociocultural element seems more essential to the election of Barack Obama, in my view, than that of the inexorable turnover of generations, producing populations which, in broad general strokes, think and feel differently about what they want from their government from those who came before them. Certainly the 36-year semi-revolutions he mentions can be seen as progressive or regressive reactions on the part of each new generation to the thrust of the one which came before.

It seems entirely possible, then, that what Lind is documenting here is the regular turnover of generations -- and the changes in governance which emerge from the social tides they produce, apparently like clockwork.