Johnny and Amanda, sitting in a tree...

...W-I-N-N-I-N-G. Or so all good people hope. Congratulations to Amanda on her new job with the Edwards campaign!

Welcome to the Hellmouth

I haven't been posting much recently because I've been on the road, and preparing for the job talk at BGSU. But I liked this line from Spencer Ackerman, discussing the appearance of apocalyptic Shiite death cults in Iraq: "We don't need Petraeus in Iraq, we need Buffy the motherfucking Vampire Slayer."

Norms! Norms! Norms!

I think my friends up at the University of Michigan would like this.

Speaking of which, I'm going to be seeing them soon! Here's my travel schedule for the end of January and the beginning of February:

January 25-29: Cambridge, MA
January 29-31: Ann Arbor, MI
February 1-4: Bowling Green, OH
-Possible trip to Chicago to visit my sister, Supriya Sinhababu-
February 4-15: Ann Arbor, MI

Then I return to Texas, where we're doing a Nietzsche conference and I'm commenting on a paper.

Did you guys write this song for me?

I'm listening to the Decemberists' "Yankee Bayonet" right now (you can download it from this guy), and I have this eerie feeling that the song was written to satisfy basically every lyrical preference I have. I like folk songs where girls sing about their soldier lads fallen in battle, and folk songs where the soldiers sing about the girls back home, and this is both at once. I'm on record highlighting the poignancy of references to death in which becoming food for scavengers is discussed, and the girl says to her dead man, "But you are in the ground with the wolves and the weevils / All a'chew on your bones so dry." I like songs that tell stories with mild supernatural content, and the guy appears to be a ghost, or at least a dead guy singing. Furthermore, it's a really nice duet, all pretty and acoustic, and I'm a wuss. A happy wuss.

Two Edwards posts

The first one is on Daily Kos. (Yes, I post there sometimes!) I was trying to let the Kossacks know about how Edwards fought back against the Bush-McCain escalation plan last night on Jay Leno's show. People liked the poll at the end.

The second one started as a way of trumpeting Kate Michelman's endorsement of John Edwards, but segued into a defense of the positive right to have an abortion. It gets kind of Rawlsy at some points (I've been reading a fair bit of Rawls lately).

Run, Rudy, Run!

If you buy the conventional wisdom that Rudy Giuliani is too liberal on abortion, gun control, and gay rights to win the Republican nomination, you should want him in the Republican primary. Anything that forces John McCain to humiliate himself with more Stupid Politician Tricks is good for Democrats. Since Giuliani and McCain will be splitting whatever votes are available to Republicans Republicans don't trust, a Giuliani candidacy will put pressure on McCain, and push him into more electability-reducing panders to the GOP base. Unelectable Republicans like Gingrich and Brownback, who are more appealing to the base, have better chances of winning the primary if there's a strong Rudy candidacy that cuts into McCain's votes.

Drunk global poverty posts? fuck yeah.

What happens when I try to post on how to deal with poverty in Third World countries while being drunk off my ass? This, I guess. It's mostly a blockquote of stuff from a good article on the subject, so I don't think it shows too many signs of my current inebriation, but I'm guessing there are some.

Jefferson's Koran

This story gave me a little bit of yay:

Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he'd take his oath of office on the Koran -- especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values.

Yet the holy book at tomorrow's ceremony has an unassailably all-American provenance. We've learned that the new congressman -- in a savvy bit of political symbolism -- will hold the personal copy once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

"He wanted to use a Koran that was special," said Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress, who was contacted by the Minnesota Dem early in December. Dimunation, who grew up in Ellison's 5th District, was happy to help.