Barack Obama, Tuesday:

“We had to go into overtime. But we are now in the red zone. That’s exactly right. We’re in the red zone. We’ve got to punch it through.”

Nancy Pelosi, Tuesday:

“We are very close to doing that in a comprehensive way.”

Well, then! Let’s git ’er done!

What?

Read more »

What else can we say?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBGZ934–AQ

Hey kids!  Illinois voted today!  And guess who has two thumbs and lives in Illinois?  This guy!

Sparse running commentary / Open Thread lies beneath.

1912 (Chicago War Time) — So this morning I voted.  And then I rode my bike (8.5 miles) to work.  Last second thing at said workplace had me there until 1810.  As every Chicagoan knows: dry cleaners close at 7:00 p.m.  Not 7:01 or 7:02, but 7:00 p.m.  Bust my ass to get home, pick up dry cleaning, and write this here post.

I say this for two reasons.  One: I now get to tell my grandkids, “in my day, I biked 8.5 miles to work in the snow.  Both ways.”  Two: the rage inside me when I heard when turnout was “extremely low” in Chicago due to — excuse me — a quarter-inch of SNOW??  Christ, the rage was massive.  We have 275 snowfighting trucks and CONTINUING TEAM COVERAGE, and nobody can roll out of bed and vote?  After Blago?  After Stroger?  Bad day to flake out, people.

Downstate turnout, however, was steady.  This could end really badly. 
Read more »

Whatever else you might think of Mark Sanford, it’s clear that he’s a, um, visionary:

South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford recalls how she made the “leap of faith” to marry husband Gov. Mark Sanford even though the groom refused to promise to be faithful, insisting that the clause be removed from their wedding vows.

“It bothered me to some extent, but… we were very young, we were in love,” she said in an exclusive interview with Barbara Walters to air on “20/20” Friday. “I questioned it, but I got past it… along with other doubts that I had.”

Pure genius: You can’t break a vow you never made in the first place.

Jenny Sanford Exclusive: Husband Refused to Be Faithful in Wedding Vows [ABC, via TPM]

We’ve often mentioned that we find Countdown to be fine dinnertime entertainment. Weekdays at five is a perfect time for light political news. We doubt we could suffer anything like that at eight, but that’s a convenience of living on the Left Coast.

It helps that we don’t take Keith Olbermann seriously enough to bother with criticism. You can see the leading questions a mile away, and we enjoy watching guests try to bat them to the side. The show’s full of fun foul tips.

Which is why we also enjoy folks who do take Olbermann seriously, as if he was somehow important. The attacks fly from both directions — one side treating him at a hotheaded celebrity who needs to be taken down a peg, the other side treating him as a hotheaded traitor who dares question the Neocon Ascendancy.

Folks like Stuart Schwartz of Liberty University and the American Thinker:

Read more »

• That’s odd. We’ve only seen three of them. [Oscars]
• What we talk about when we talk about DADT. For the next year. [NYT]
• Sarah calls Rahm indecent for calling opponents “fucking retarded.” [Facebook]
• Talibunny’s latest supermarket bomb. Although the publisher swears this one isn’t checkstand poison. [WaPo]

Every so often, we’re rudely reminded that we live a sheltered life. We should be thankful for that — if we’re easily distracted by flame wars over the iPad’s lack of Flash, we have it pretty good. Some things we just don’t have to deal with in our life.

For example, we’re not a twelve-year-old girl forced into prostitution on the streets of Atlanta. We don’t have to deal with pimps. We don’t have to deal with johns. We don’t have to deal with the police.

And we don’t have to deal with goddamn soulless Christians who don’t give a shit about our plight.

Case in point: Georgia state senator Renee Unterman has introduced a laudable bill that “would steer girls under the age of 16 into diversionary programs instead of arresting them as prostitutes.”

Read more »