Tell your friends you read it here first. Don’t bother watching the wall-to-wall cable television coverage of today’s handful of odd-year elections. Robert McDonnell, the Republican candidate, will be elected governor of Virginia. Barring a minor miracle, incumbent New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine will lose to Republican Chris Christie. Douglas Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate, will trounce Democrat...

This point has been made before, but not usually as bluntly as here (emphasis in original):

I just finished reading a fantastic and timely book. Fantastic because of how the writer, Doug Stanton, brilliantly and in gritty, sometimes grisly detail describes the unprecedented actions of a band of American Special Forces heroes who rode into Afghanistan after 9/11 during the opening days of what is now the Afghanistan War. Timely, not necessarily because of what these magnificent men did on horseback...

Attention deficit disorder:

It’s not what you might think. It’s not dying in battle. It’s not losing your life. It’s losing your mind, your heart, your soul, and the life force inside you that makes you want to survive.

Joe already touched on tonight’s HBO documentary. Two other Obama-related items today add some context. The first is Jeff Zeleny’s report for the NYT re: Iowa voter attitudes a year after the election. The second is a Daily Beast exclusive excerpt from David Plouffe’s memoir. The NYT article cites, among others, John Sager a “retired electrical engineer who became a Democrat to support...

Bill Schorr, Cagle Cartoons This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to appear on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

Biden, Absolutists, Irony and NY-23 by Jon Wells Vice President Joe Biden was in upstate New York today stumping for Bill Owens in the heated NY-23 Congressional special election. You know, the one that doesn’t matter and has no national portent whatsoever, except if Owens wins, of course. In any event, Biden had a few words to say about Scozzafava’s departure and the GOP: We aren’t asking...

What Physicians Know by Joel S. Hirschhorn I had a long conversation with my favorite physician, who has operated on me twice successfully. He is an incredibly kind person without an ounce of greed or pretense. Like other physicians I have spoken to, he spoke eloquently about the terrible times he consistently has with private health insurance companies. While he praises Medicare for its simplicity and certainty,...

Our political quote of the day comes from conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh on moderates and the Republican party: “Moderates by definition have no principles,”….He predicted that “RINOs” – a putdown acronym of “Republicans In Name Only” – “may become extinct.”

Just how DID he get those free tickets?

Lots of documentaries aspire to be authentic fly-on-the-wall enterprises, offering viewers a chance to see what they didn’t see on the news, didn’t learn from official statements, and get a feel of what “really” went on behind-the-scenes and what the key political players are “really like.” HBO’s By The People: The Election of Barack Obama which airs at 9 p.m. tonight...

Imagine for a moment that a segment of the Southern Baptist Church was supporting the idea of parents killing their teenage daughters for going out on dates. The public reaction would be swift and severe (and properly so). Media figures like Bill Maher would go ballistic, labeling the entire Christian Church with such behavior. And yet when this exact thing is happening within the Muslim community the reaction...

The always worth-reading Rick Moran — even when I couldn’t disagree with him more (and this is not one of those times) — has a piece on how to make the GOP a majority party again — and it isn’t by reading the ideologically impure out of the party:

Can Russia break the strongman habit? Is Russia ready for Western-Style democracy – which includes true pluralism and checks on the executive? It’s a debate that’s been going on since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This article from Izvestia - once the official mouthpiece of the Soviet government – openly, unapologetically and arrestingly admits that the answer is no. Nor does it wish to...

According to Fox News’ fair and balanced journalist, Chris Wallace. Oh.

Actually, most of this 7-screen profile is not this openly vicious. Vanessa Grigoriadis generally prefers to kill with a thousand paper cuts rather than take a butcher knife to her target of choice. If you’re looking to learn something substantive about Pelosi’s political thinking and/or the professional and personal factors that formed her values and who she is as a person, you will be disappointed....

Josh Marshall at TPM (emphasis mine):

Oooops.

The news that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been declare the winner of Afghanistan’s hotly contested and controversial Presidential election now ensures that the Afghanistan issue be an ongoing controversial one on several fronts in several countries. Clearly, the fact that his prime foe former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah has pulled out rather than participate in a runoff that Abdullah insisted...

Via Ezra Klein. At the end of his post, note the link to the full package of charts. The last chart in that package, in particular — see below — caught my eye, begging many questions. Bruce McQuain chimes in. H/t casualobserver.

WASHINGTON — The next health care fight has already started. It’s the battle to define the bill that President Obama will eventually sign as a victory for consumers, taxpayers and the common good. You might say this view is premature. Legislation has yet to pass the House or the Senate, there are differences between the two bodies, and some moderates still have doubts. But barring astoundingly...

As most of you who follow this sort of thing have surely heard by now, Dierdre “Dede” Scozzafava, the Republican who dropped out of the House race in NY-23 on Saturday, has endorsed not the Conservative (and new Republican) candidate, Doug Hoffman, but the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens. Given that Scozzafava is a moderate who supports abortion rights and gay rights, and that Owens is the flavour...

A fascinating post from a consistently solid writer and thinker. His third point is key. (Apologies if one of my colleagues has already pointed to this post. There has been so much written on this subject that I have not been able to read it all, including what has been written here.)

A koan is a short, often paradoxical idea, meant to tell the truth, or cause the ego to give up, or cause enlightenment, or all three. Old well known koans: What is the sound of one hand clapping? What is the sound of a tree falling in the forest, if there is no one there to hear it? I try my hand at koans. I’m no good at it, but I try. Why it is so easy for ‘the base’ of any side to fall...