“Rick Perry intends to use a speech in South Carolina on Saturday to make clear that he’s running for president, POLITICO has learned. According to two sources familiar with the plan, the Texas governor will remove any doubt about his White House intentions during his appearance at a RedState conference in Charleston.”

Title: “How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines”

Author: Thomas C. Foster

Rank: 66

Blurb: “What does it mean when a fictional hero takes a journey? Shares a meal? Gets drenched in a sudden rain shower? Often, there is much more going on in a novel or poem than is readily visible on the surface — a symbol, maybe, that remains elusive, or an unexpected twist on a character — and there’s that sneaking suspicion that the deeper meaning of a literary text keeps escaping you.”

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The Stock Market’s crashing again, Standard & Poor’s hates America, Rick Perry is holding his God-In today… We’re just gonna hide in our Lego Batcave until all this blows over.

“The U.S. Postal Service reported Friday that it suffered a net $3.1 billion loss in the three months ending June 30. Without the intervention of Congress, the service said, it will default on payments it owes the federal government in September.” [The Hill]

Our guest columnist is Christopher Guerrero of the California Democratic Party.

For years, Democrats in California ceded inland areas of the state to the Republican Party.

That ends today as we take the fight into one of the GOP’s final remaining strongholds in California: the Inland Empire.

Right now, the CDP is partnering with Democrats in the Inland Empire to run the first coordinated voter registration drive in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, and we are starting to see results.

People are coming up to our volunteers and thanking them or telling them that they didn’t even realize what they believed in made them a Democrat.

California Democrats need to stand together and offer encouragement. If you have a story about turning one of your Republican family members into a Democrat or helping your area turn Democratic (or even just a little “bluer”), please share it today so we can all see that It Gets Bluer.

Share your story of how it got bluer for you at ItGetsBluer.com now.

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Silent Creative Partner doesn’t follow politics and pays little attention to news, which makes him a far more typical American than we’ll ever hope to be. He’s solidly liberal in outlook — something we used to think was typically American — although we doubt he would label himself as such, because he doesn’t see himself in those terms.

(Not that we care for labels either — if forced to declare, we’d sign up for the Cannibal Anarchist Party — but obviously we travel with progressives, even if we don’t wear the uniform.)

Living in Southern California, the economy hasn’t really touched him, and while you can find teabaggers if you go looking for them, they’re not part of our daily landscape. Even government itself, which here as elsewhere permeates and underwrites our existence, isn’t quite visible — yes, we have cops and streets and garbage collection and an airport and even a military base up the road, but you can go very long stretches without quite being aware of what enables your bliss.

Which is, really, the Genius of America — at least for us Left Coast white males who benefit from it. Like Steve Jobs says, it just works.

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