Positively Palin—Sixty-four percent of Republicans polled by Rasmussen shortly after the election said that they would choose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be their party’s presidential candidate in 2012; 91 percent of Republicans in the same poll responded that they have a “favorable” view of her, while 65 percent said “very favorable,” and only 8 […]

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Indianola, Mississippi THIRTY-FIVE. THAT’S THE NUMBER OF TIMES Charles McLaurin was arrested between 1961 and 1965. McLaurin said he beat the odds because he was badly beaten only once, when he and four friends were stopped by a highway patrolman in August 1964, near the Alabama state line. They were traveling to a Student Non-Violent […]

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RUNNING A RIFF THAT SEVERAL MEMBERS of Congress had reduced to one paragraph, while Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson groped for the right mix of money and policy to keep a recession from spiraling into a depression, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) described the state of the nation: “We are facing what has been called the most […]

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Campaign Grammar—The dirty wars waged by right-wing despots in South and Central America turned the word “disappeared” into both a noun and a transitive verb. Here in the U.S. it appears that former Senator Phil Gramm is a desaparecido and that John McCain has disappeared him. One of the sponsors of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which […]

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THE DAY AFTER SARAH PALIN passed her campaign midterm exam, the Congress passed a Wall Street bailout bill. In reacting to the news, the Dow Jones Industrial Average did worse than Palin did in her excruciatingly manneristic ninety minutes on stage with Joe Biden, falling 157 points on the news of a 263-171 House vote […]

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