We don’t know what there is to say that hasn’t been said, that we haven’t said before, and more than once. The verdict came down Friday, and it may have been a shock, but it wasn’t a surprise. Everyone saw it coming, from the start.

People have talked about the judge, about trial procedure, about how the laws themselves are written, and these are all relevant subjects. But they don’t, to our satisfaction, get at the problem here, of which this has been yet another example, but not the thing itself.

So we ended up doing what we’ve done before: Look at voting demographics.

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Uncle Joe isn’t gonna save us, is he?

We wanted Uncle Joe to save us. That’s who everybody said we wanted, anyway. Everybody’s worried that we don’t want Grandpa Bernie to save us, or Aunt Liz. Everybody’s worried about what we think. They think we want Uncle Joe to save us. Only Uncle Joe isn’t gonna save us.

But maybe Cranky Mike will!

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Dear gawd, this is confusing…

Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli has filed a petition with the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond asking the full 15-judge court to reconsider a decision by a three-judge panel last month that overturned the state’s sodomy law.

Okay, not that part. Sounds like fun! The Cooch fights for your right to legally hate icky sex!

The three-judge panel ruled 2-1 on March 12 that a section of Virginia’s “Crimes Against Nature” statute that outlaws sodomy between consenting adults, gay or straight, is unconstitutional based on a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2003 known as Lawrence v. Texas.

Crimes against nature? Sounds like a great statute to prosecute oil companies!

But here’s the confusing part:

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“Republicans are seen by Asians — as they are by Latinos, blacks, and some large proportion of whites — as the party of Bible-thumping, anti-gay, anti-abortion creationists. Factually, that’s ludicrously inaccurate.” [Charles Murray/AEI]

Years back, in the early days of Britain’s National Theatre when it was still at the Old Vic, they mounted a revival of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear for which they brought over from Paris the celebrated director Michel St Dennis to work with the actors. M. Dennis, immensely experienced in the intricate and subtle workings of farce, would say to them, “Tiens! If you stand zere you will not get zee laugh. If you stand ‘ere… ” and he’d move them maybe a foot or two upstage/downstage/left/right/… “… you weel get zee laugh.” This perplexed the cast but they took him at his word and lo and behold, when they played before an audience, his predictions came true. Now while I don’t generally subscribe to the notion that anyone can accurately predict what will make an audience laugh – I find it somehow philistine and rarely productive as audiences will always surprise you – with a man of M. Dennis’s experience, it pays to listen.

Which brings me to last night: more than two men clashing over radically differing ideas of tailoring (the Republican ticket seems clueless about how to fit a jacket properly let alone a shirt collar, Ryan looked like a boy wearing hand-me-downs), we had on display two very different ideas on how to use a stage.

Beginners will always try to get as far downstage as possible thinking this gives them an advantage as they’re closer to the audience. Wrong.

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National Empty Chair Day (photos from around country) [Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion]