A few days ago I predicted on Facebook that she’d be gone within a week, but  then retracted the prediction when I learned more about the heavy-Right political leanings of the rest of the board (and the involvement of Ari Fleischer in their strategy development).

On Friday, just before America took its collective brain offline for Super Bowl Weekend, Komen offered up a fake apology that encouraged the public to believe that it had changed its mind and was going to continue funding Planned Parenthood after all, even though its release actually said nothing of the sort. It isn’t clear how many average citizens the ploy fooled, but as I explained on Saturday, it sure as hell clowned the copy desk editors of just about every major news outlet in the country.

It’s hard to say at this point what the motivation is for Handel’s exit. Maybe the board is looking at the numbers and concluding that it still hasn’t done enough to assuage the anger of its donor base, and in this case it needs a scapegoat. Or maybe Handel is taking more personal heat than she’s comfortable with and just said to hell with it.

However, what isn’t happening is a substantive reversal on the part of the Komen organization. That social conservative board, in bed with the repugnant, fork-tongued Fleischer, has not decided that it was wrong. Whatever is going on today is designed to distract the public so that they can find another means of enacting their cynical agenda.

I said last week that three things need to happen before America should even consider giving Komen a penny of its cash or a second of its support. First, Handel must go. Second, the rest of the board must go (and at this point, I think that has to include founder Nancy Brinker, who can no longer be trusted). Finally, as I said Friday, demand “that they work with non-partisan health and women’s groups to replace [Handel and the board] with leaders who will put the well being of American women first.”

One down, two to go. Women’s health should not be subjugated to the whims of a partisan agenda, and Handel’s departure, while welcomed, is nothing more than a small first step on a long, rocky road to reconciliation.

I encourage those dedicated to the cause of cancer research and women’s health generally to do a little research. In addition to Planned Parenthood, there are many other local and national organizations who can put those dollars to valuable use.

Contrary to what Komen’s highly-paid PR crisis hacks and gullible headline writers at newsdesks around the nation would ask you to believe, The Susan G. Komen Foundation does NOT promise to fund Planned Parenthood in the future. They promise to let PP APPLY for grants in the future. Applying and receiving are different things, as anyone who ever applied and got rejected for a job ought to know.

I have some experience in the world of corporate communications, folks. Lots and lots, in fact, and I’ve been inside a Fortune 150 war room when the wheels flew off. Today’s media charade is an attempt to get the heat off  as soon as possible. Textbook stuff.

The announcement is timed beautifully – just before Super Bowl Weekend – and they’re hoping that the combination of the pretend apology and the big game will insure that, come Monday morning, nobody will remember what they did. They can then find a reason to deny those future Planned Parenthood grant apps when nobody is paying much attention.

So, America – how stupid are you?

If you want Komen to do the right thing, demand that they fire their aggressively anti-abortion president and their anti-abortion board and that they work with non-partisan health and women’s groups to replace them with leaders who will put the well being of American women first.

Anything short of that plays right into the hands of those who’d hold breast cancer victims hostage to a social conservative political agenda.

Actress and lesbian Cynthia Nixon has caused a firestorm in the gayosphere by saying that for her, sexual orientation was a choice.

Obviously, this view undermines the arguments of gay political orthodoxy, and gives the right wingnuts who run “gay rehabilitation prayer camps” support that they were right all along–”See Harold, I told you he was just doing it to be ornery.”  Of course, the truth is  probably like most things: The truth is somewhere in between. It may be for her, but it isn’t for most gay people.

At any rate, this becomes pretty scary when coupled with another news item from the week, news that conservatives are conservative because they are stupid.

Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found.

And this isn’t some progressive spoof either, it’s a peer reviewed study based on longitudinal market research in the U.K. Now on first blush, you’d think this would bring a smile to our liberal faces. And it did. I admit it. (Although I started to send it to my conservative friends, but didn’t, since I thought it might be cruel. Probably not, since they don’t believe in science and statistics anyway.)

But the more you think about it, the bigger problem it is for us. Because if people are conservative because they’re stupid, then that’s a problem because one of our core tenets is: It’s off-limits to persecute people for things they have no control over like skin color, sexual orientation, intelligence, etc. I can see it now. At some Florida supermarket somewhere, a small boy is pointing to a seventy year-old woman wearing a halter top, hot pants and a Newt Gingrich button and his mom is saying, “Shhhhh! Don’t point, Alex. She’s a Republican, but she can’t help it.”  And this means that we have to stop mocking Rush and all right-wing positions on climate, gun control, taxes and the like, because they are too dumb to understand why their ideas are bad.

Just outside Chicago, one hospital is advertising its obesity clinic with billboards that say, “It’s a disease, not a decision.”

Romney-Santorum 2012. It’s a condition, not a choice.

“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”

Most of you know the basics. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1940s and 1950s. Olympic greatness. Sonny Liston. Draft dodger. Muslim. One of the most dramatic comebacks in sports history.

Social activist. Global icon. The Greatest.

And for one working class white kid growing up in the North Carolina outback, his very first African-American role model.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

No Viet Cong ever called Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali a nigger, but a lot of people I grew up with (including very close family members, I’m ashamed to say) sure did. Ali was everything that terrified the white South. He was physically dominating (with all the undercurrents that implies). He was “uppity” incarnate. He was unAmerican for refusing to go to Vietnam. He was the devil for converting to Islam. And deep down, the part that scared them the worst was this: they understood, I think, that he was smarter than they were, too.

The problem was, I never believed that I was supposed to hate him. Maybe it was my age – I wasn’t quite old enough to take offense at the Vietnam thing. All I really knew about the war was what I saw on television, and every night they’d show the number of boys killed that day in the fighting. I don’t recall thinking about this in anything like deep, philosophical terms, but if I had I imagine I might have figured Vietnam was well worth dodging.

As for the Islam thing, well, all us crackers were afraid of blacks. Especially crowds of them demanding stuff. But … even if I was young and ignorant and irrationally afraid of blacks, I wasn’t afraid of him. He didn’t seem to asking for anything unreasonable and he wasn’t hurting anybody. Maybe I thought that if we met he’d like me, too.

But I was just a kid. All I really knew was what I saw: Ali was brilliant. He was objectively the best fighter alive and he was also fun. His charisma didn’t just fill the room, it overwhelmed the entire world. You could feel it, almost tangibly, even through the little 13″ black and white TV in our living room in Wallburg, NC. He said he was the greatest and it was obviously so, especially for a smart-aleck kid from the “it ain’t bragging if it’s true” school of thought.

At home I am a nice guy: but I don’t want the world to know. Humble people, I’ve found, don’t get very far.

Today Muhammad Ali, the most famous man in the world, turns 70, and we as a nation, as a species, are better for knowing him. It’s even more certain that I’m a better person because of the courage and verve with which he lived his life.

A life that I hope is nowhere near over. Happy Birthday, Champ.

I know where I’m going and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.

Government buildings are closed, the post office is closed, most K-12 schools are closed and many universities cancel classes for the day.

The idea behind the holiday was so people could focus on the good works of Dr. King.

Years ago, when I was a faculty member at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, students had protested the fact that campus remained open and classes, except for two hours midday, met, as usual. Top level administrators responding to student pressure decided to change the calendar and cancel classes. The only one objecting was then-Vice President Wilma Ray Bledsoe, the only African American (and, I believe, woman) on the cabinet at that time.

Wilma Ray objected because she believed students on campus would turn the day off into a three day weekend rather than join the campus in marches and other ceremonies of remembrances and study of the life of Dr. King.

She was right. MLK Day for most college and K-12 students now is just that – a three day holiday from studies. The local ski resorts, thankfully covered in the white stuff now, are having their best day of the season so far. The malls are busier, too. Many other students are sleeping in today or enjoying the pleasure of being home.

There are marches on campuses, the media has covered the holiday, but I have to wonder.

A mother I know asked her 12 year-old son who Dr. King was. He had no idea. He was miffed because his school wasn’t closed today. His cousins had the day off. None of them knew who Dr. King was either.

Wrong idea, eh?  Were I a talented black athlete, I wonder if all those Confederate flags that still fly along the road side would bother me. Or the fact  that UM has not been particularly successful in retiring  its mascot “Colonel Reb.”  In case you’ve never seen a UM football game, and they’re dreadful so there’s no reason you’d want to, Colonel Reb is a goateed plantation owner. I kid you not. Nah, I am sure as a young black man it wouldn’t bother me one bit to have a plantation owner standing on the sidelines yelling “Run, boy, run!” Nor would it probably bother me that the replacement mascot is named the “Rebel Black Bear” or that most students have refused to adopt the bear and instead have started using Ackbar (the rebel leader from Star Wars, get it?)

Of course, the local press has said that the coach is full of it.

No doubt. Despite being in a hotbed of football talent and playing in the most prestigious football conference in America, the University of Mississippi this year was 2 and 10, and the 107th best football team in America.

Ala. GOP leaders have 2nd thoughts on immigration
By PHILLIP RAWLS

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama Republicans who pushed through the nation’s toughest law against illegal immigrants are having second thoughts amid a backlash from big business, fueled by the embarrassing traffic stops of two foreign employees tied to the state’s prized Honda and Mercedes plants.

The Republican attorney general is calling for some of the strictest parts of it to be repealed.

Some Republican lawmakers say they now want to make changes in the law that was pushed quickly through the legislature.

Sometimes I think the problem is Democrats see the likely results of Republican policies ahead of time and argue against them  rather than just letting these fools go ahead and do dumb stuff and see what happens.

This also happened in the state next door. In Georgia, they lost some of the crop last year because of lack of labor. Any competent economist could have told them that not allowing immigrants in would either reduce agricultural output or raise wages in agriculture to a level where unemployed Americans would take those jobs, which would reduce farm profitability, neither one of which is good for the Republicans who wrote the law.

I realize letting Republicans do what they please is dangerous, because the negative effects of some of what they want to do will only become obvious in the mid to longer terms, and they can do a lot of damage in the interval, e.g., the end of Glass-Steagall and the resulting financial crisis. Also, we will never get the satisfaction of having them admit they were wrong since they rewrite history, like they have explained away the Great Depression.

My high school had a chemistry teacher nicknamed Chrome Dome, who was legendarilyy tight lipped. School lore had it that student once asked him if he drank a beaker of a magnesium solution, if it would kill him. CD thought for a moment before saying no, the kid drank it and ended up in the hospital. Probably apocryphal.

Still, some times you have to let people make their own mistakes.  Can you say “Newt?”

I, and most people who think they know something about football, have been pretty vocal about the fact that Tebow sucks as a quarterback. The people who disagree with us insist his intangibles make up for his lack of tangibles, an argument so absurd that we have trouble getting our heads around it. If tangibles don’t matter, maybe I should not have been so quick to dismiss a career as a porn star.

Of course, what drives most of us crazy is that the people who are making the argument for Tebow happen to be not only white, but bat-shit crazy evangelicals, raising the suspicion in our minds that maybe this isn’t about football and logic at all, but about racism or religion. After all, for years after blacks were finally allowed to play professional football they weren’t allowed to play quarterback because they lacked intangibles like intelligence, unlike white quarterbacks like Terry Bradshaw and Kerry Collins, the latter of whom was so smart that he thought his offensive line (the guys charged with protecting him) would enjoy hearing racist jokes. But Kerry failed to notice his O-line was black, and the next game they looked less like football players and more like matadors letting bulls rush by. In other words, the intelligence thing was yet another bit of back door discrimination.

And evangelicals really do believe that God intercedes actively and continuously in daily events, meaning there’s no reason not to believe that he would stick out a heavenly toe to trip a cornerback if it meant one of Timmy’s recievers could get open. Of course that still leaves the problem that Tim is about as accurate as a forty-four magnum handgun with a sawed-off barrel, that is to say, not at all. So there’s no guarantee that Tim could hit said reciever if he stood all by himself in the middle of the field while God smote every defender in sight.

But tonight, having watched Tebow’s crew win another game they should not have won, I am rethinking my position. No, I still don’t think God, were he or she to exist, would bother to rig a professional sports game for the benefit of a handful of fans. Nor do I believe that if she were to do so, she would do it for evangelicals, who are about as obnoxious as you can get and not be a coach for Penn State. And I certainly don’t believe that Tebow can throw or ever will be able to.

But what I am rethinking is my belief that you have to be able to throw to be a quarterback. Maybe you don’t. Maybe I’ve been brainwashed by listening to thousands of hours of ESPN and the like where broadcasters drone on about “this is quarterback’s league” and “you must have an elite quarterback to win.” Because obviously, that ain’t true. Philip Rivers can throw a football through a donut at sixty yards and what good has that done the Chargers? Tebow throws like my sister and he’s 4 and 1.

Maybe the fact that Matt Millen, the one human being who has proved beyond all doubt that he knows absolutely nothing about football, can get a job as an expert should have tipped me off.

In other words, Tebow is fine. It’s football that’s fucked.

When we were putting S&R together in 2007 I hunted down Gavin Chait and begged him to join us. He’s one of the smartest guys I know, a relentless, good faith thinker and someone you can count on to hit you with a perspective you hadn’t thought about. He wrote our very first post and also penned at least one of our absolute very best posts.

We don’t always agree, though. (Which is good – how boring would it be if we did?) In a recent post, Gavin addressed the topic of the latest Discworld novel in a post entitled “Terry Pratchett and the redemption of the Orcs.” If you review the post and the comment thread you’ll see that I take Gavin to task for misrepresenting Pratchett. Gavin’s reply (@2) neatly gets to his overarching point:

The 1% sell us stuff. If we bought it, we’re complicit. Claiming that we bought under duress isn’t going to wash. Claiming that the 1% are different from ourselves does a disservice to us.

And I’m not claiming that the 1% are an oppressed minority. They’re already a minority, that’s a given. I’m saying that making these claims about them will turn them into an oppressed minority.

Normally I’d carry this discussion on in the comments, but occasionally I feel like a discussion deserves to be brought forward and addressed in a new post, and this is such a case. In sum, I agree, to some extent, with the point I think Gavin intends to make, which is that scapegoating can lead us down an ugly path. History certainly provides fodder for that argument. However, it strikes me that in invoking Pratchett in the way he does, Gavin does a disservice to the ethos of Discworld and undercuts his own thesis.

I’d begin with a challenge to his characterization of “the 1%.” The problematic concept here is “minority.” In normal parlance, this term usually connotes a social, political or economic disadvantage resulting from a group’s small numbers. However, the term is of no value when discussing groups that comprise a numerical minority but that have political or economic heft all out of proportion to their numbers. Gavin, being a native South African, needs no lessons from me on one prominent example, the ruling whites under Apartheid.

In truth, many societies have been dominated by “the 1%” throughout history. Only under modern theories of governance like democracy, communism or socialism are the majority assumed to possess the power. So any argument that America’s ruling elites are a minority in any meaningful way is numerically accurate, but otherwise misleading. They have a vastly disproportionate share of the power and wealth (the 400 richest Americans own as much as the poorest 150 million) and even an elementary study of contemporary America indicates their effectiveness in using this leverage to cultivate arguably the most mystifyingly potent hegemony in human history.

I’d also point to Gavin’s list of the grievances against American corporations and the section that follows:

Like the Spanish Inquisition before them, that one has had the thought that something is possible is all the evidence required to damn someone utterly.

Guilt is obvious, there is no appeal and there is certainly no need for anything so paltry as evidence or a trial.  The 1% are beyond redemption.  And when a body of people is beyond redemption then any form of collective punishment is seen as having divine sanction.  The vermin will be destroyed.

In this way minorities have been corralled and made sacrificial effigies for millennia.

This is compelling writing, but it asks us to believe that the bulleted list of charges sprang out of thin air. On the contrary, that list is not a collection of first principles that we are asked to accept as a priori assumptions, but is rather a concise rendering of conclusions based on expansive familiarity with the political economic dynamics that have ushered us to our present dire moment.

Further, the #Occupy protesters are not asking for a lynching. One of their explicit demands is that those who gamed the system to their gain and to the ruin of those who trusted them be brought to trial. No one is storming the jail or throwing a rope over a limb. Instead, what is demanded is the application of the rule of law, a function that has been corrupted by the aforementioned power and wealth.

Next, some thoughts on how Gavin characterizes the Discworld mythos. I haven’t heard Sir Terry talk about his politics, so all I can do is try and infer from his writings. The conclusions I’d draw are that he believes in communitarianism and strong, responsive government. If you pay close attention to the Granny Weatherwax cycle, for instance, there is no question that he sees it as a society’s responsibility to take care of its own. Granny and her fellow witches aren’t government agents (unless you count Magrat Garlick marrying the king), but they never miss a chance to encourage their constituents to behave charitably. Sometimes this encouragement is rather … pointed.

You might respond that this is purely libertarian, because we’re seeing the free will actions of individuals, and to a point I would grant you the argument. But look at Ankh-Morpork. There’s nothing remotely libertarian at work there – Lord Vetinari’s word is law, and he’s frighteningly pragmatic about things. All he cares about is that it works. There’s not much ideology anywhere in sight, and he’s not above using any tool at his disposal to assure that things continue to function.

The result? A prosperous, booming city that – and this is important – is a model of racial diversity. Dwarves and trolls coexist with humans (and vampires, and werewolves, and gnolls, and goblins, and the occasional zombie), and do so with no more in the way of violence and disharmony than you’d find in most major modern cities. A big part of why it works is because Vetinari is crafty about holding the traditional power elites in check. Doing so allows the bottom-up emergence of opportunity by those not born to influence.

Up next, Gavin makes a curious claim on Pratchett’s behalf.

Terry Pratchett, writer of the universally successful Discworld series of books, has been one of my favourite authors for more than 25 years.  Even his most evil characters are redeemable.  [emphasis added]

This strikes me as patently wrong. In fact, Pratchett has given us a goodly number of evil characters with no redeemable qualities whatsoever.

• Lady Felmet (a Lady Macbeth type from Wyrd Sisters) has very little to recommend her.
• Likewise Lilith, the evil fairy godmother in Witches Abroad.
• Gavin’s invocation of the Inquisition above is noteworthy as we consider the rank malevolence of Vorbis, head of the Quisition, in Small Gods.
• The elven queen in Lords and Ladies (and later in the Tiffany Aching cycle)? Sweet hell, where was the redemption in her?
• Angua’s brother, Wolfgang, demonstrates no apparent redeeming qualities in The Fifth Elephant.
• Carcer, from Thief of Time, is one of the most relentlessly evil characters you’re likely to see and he remains that way up until the moment of his death.
• Corporal Strappi in The Monstrous Regiment - pure Stasi.
• Then there’s the unparalleled sociopathy of Mr. Teatime in Hogfather.
• In a case that serves as a rather direct indictment of “the 1%,” consider The Grand Trunk Company and Reacher Gilt in Going Postal.
• In Unseen Academicals, Andy Shank seems to be every stupid, hateful British soccer hooligan all rolled into one, and if there is ever any hope of redemption for him it doesn’t happen in the actual book.
• In the latest novel, Snuff, we’re treated to two irredeemable characters, the younger Lord Rust (who doesn’t actually appear, but who is the unseen instigator of the crimes against the goblins) and the homocidal Stratford.

This isn’t the whole list, either. It is true that Pratchett finds hope for redemption in all races, but there is simply no argument to made for all individuals. Perhaps it’s the racial/collective angle Gavin is thinking of when he makes this argument:

He does not condemn, he does not judge. He offers compassion, empathy and the recognition that we are reflections and interconnections of each other.

I don’t know. I’d argue that Pratchett is judgmental as hell. Sam Vimes, for instance, is relentless in making and pursuing judgment against the corrupt. However, “compassion, empathy and the recognition that we are reflections and interconnections of each other” are perhaps the standards of humanity. It is the failure to live according to these values that is the hard line in the sand where judgment is concerned.

In the final analysis, the orcs and goblins seem to me to be in no way comparable to the 1%. On the contrary. It’s young Lord Rust who’s the 1% and the goblins are the 99% he’s selling into slavery.

Pratchett does, indeed, redeem the possibility inherent in every race and affords a space for redemption no matter what your station in life. On this point Gavin and I couldn’t agree more. Pratchett distinguishes between how we’re born and what we choose to do, and perhaps here is the nut of what I think is wrong with the argument Gavin frames out in his post. The 1% that Occupy Wall Street is protesting against is not a downtrodden minority and they are not the focus of prejudice in the way that Pratchett’s orcs and goblins are. The rage against them is rooted in law and evidence and the call is not for obliteration of a class but for a just and legal program of redress.

As presently constructed, the “orcs = the 1%” argument is like conflating armed robbers with African-Americans. Sure, both groups have their haters, but there’s no equivalency beyond that.

by Hannah Frantz

Before I came to Rwanda, I spent a week following The New Times, Rwanda’s online newspaper, to get a sense for where the country is today. The impression that I reached was that in the 17 years since the genocide, all conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi had been resolved and that everyone was making a collaborative effort to move towards peaceful relations. In my mind, Rwanda was this utopia where, through collaborative efforts, everyone could live in harmony. I’m realizing slowly that this isn’t necessarily the case.

Since the genocide, Rwandans have ceased to use the words “Hutu” and “Tutsi” unless they’re referencing “The Genocide Against the Tutsi,” the strict title of the genocide (as deemed by the government). Some people really support this movement because it reduces the labels that one can place on others, labels that actually contributed to the genocide itself. However, I have a few problems with this policy.

I get really frustrated in America when we shy away from calling someone “black” in describing people or in conversation. When I hear someone referred to as “black” it’s usually framed in a context that treats the term as though it’s pejorative. It’s as if it’s offensive the mention the color of someone’s skin. My white friends seem to feel this way because they’re pointing out something “different” about someone. I’ve always thought it’s ridiculous that we can’t even use words relating to race. Most people are so worried about being offended they they avoid discussion of race altogether. But how can you have a reasonable discussion about race relations if you can’t even use the words? It’s like when someone says “I don’t see the color of people’s skin.” Of course they do. It’s the first thing they see. And by not acknowledging it, you fail to acknowledge what makes people uniquely themselves.

I promise this relates to Rwanda….

In my mind it’s very much the same principle. How can Rwanda move past the tragedy of 1994 if you can’t even say the words “Hutu” and “Tutsi”? How can you have a meaningful dialogue without them? I understand the movement toward accepting that Rwandans are Rwandans and nothing else, but if you can’t say the words, aren’t you building a fence around a central part of the discussion?

I was talking to one of my host siblings the other day about the implications of people calling me a “muzungu” and I was trying to explain to him why I don’t necessarily take offense to it. He said it’s the only time in Rwanda that it is acceptable to label someone by appearance because you can’t do that with Hutu and Tutsi. His exact words were, “You can’t call someone a Hutu because they are a human. You can’t call a human any other names.”

Don’t get me wrong, I am 100% not saying that we should fixate on potentially divisive markers like race. I’m only saying that we need to have a dialogue to acknowledge the tensions and issues that still exist (and they do still exist). To do so, we need to use the words. How else do we resist repeating history?

Too many of us blithely consider poverty to be limited to certain geographical locations such as the “inner city.” Too many of us believe poverty is limited to, perhaps, mostly a certain skin color. Too many of us attribute poverty to the lack of an “appropriate” work ethic, a lack of ambition, or a desire to “cheat the system.” The poor live in cities, they’re not white, they’re lazy, and they’re sucking up my tax dollars unfairly.

Discard that attitude. It’s disgusting. Poverty privileges no race, no gender, no occupation, no geography.

Last year, the ranks of those reduced to the federally defined poverty line grew by 2.6 million Americans. News reports show 46.2 million Americans live in poverty, the highest number in the 52 years the federal government has tracked that number.

Forget, for the moment, who or what is responsible for leaving tens of millions of Americans economically disadvantaged while mere dozens of Americans forge financially so far ahead of 99.9 percent of us.

Forget, for the moment, those who callously led many Americans into a bankrupted poverty with foolish, deceitful decisions about lending money for home mortgages a few years ago, amplifying the ranks of those in poverty.

Forget, for the moment, the decisions to be “globally competitive” by corporations at the expense of those American jobs they’re all suddenly saying they want to create.

Forget, for the moment, the social, political, and economic decisions taken by so many that have created a permanent underclass with no significant voice in Congress. Forget, for the moment, that too many of us have chosen not to listen to the voice of those in poverty. They may be unheard, but they are not invisible.

Forget, for the moment, the folly of members of Congress and the president in fighting each other while claiming to “love America” — and forgetting to love Americans one by one, especially those whose American dream has been yanked from underneath them — or was never there in the first place.

Focus on someone you know. You’ll realize you know someone who lives in poverty — and probably more than one.

Now begin remembering. Find a way to speak for those people you know who live in poverty. Don’t waver because of self-assumed guilt. Act. Demand better from your member of Congress. Demand that a living wage become a reality. Demand creation of meaningful jobs.

And be selfish — the American economy will not recover with one-sixth of Americans unable to be the avid consumers and irritated taxpayers the rest of us have become. If you want your economic circumstance to improve, attack the root causes that place your neighbor in poverty.

Yesterday, we introduced Rick and his companion Spotty. Today, we will get to know a typical Rick Perry supporter, Jane, and tomorrow, we will spend some time with Rick’s special friend, Jesus. On Thursday, we will compare Rick to the rest of the Republican field, and on Friday….well, Friday’s a long way away, we will think of something by then.

See Jane vote.

Vote, Jane, vote!

Jane votes for Rick because he is tall.

“I am tall, too,” says Mitty the Kitty.

Jane votes for Rick because he has big hair.

“I have big hair, too,” says Mitty.

Jane votes for Rick because he hates gummit.

“Say what?” says Mitty.

Gummit, Mitty, gummit. Pay attention. This is Texas for Christ’s sake.

“I hate government, too,” says Mitty.

Jane votes for Rick because he loves Jesus.

“I love Jesus, too,” says Mitty quietly, in case Joseph Smith is listening.

“Good, Mitt, good,” says Jane.

“Will you vote for me, Jane?” says Mitty.

No, no, no.

Jane will not vote for Mitty the Kitty.

Jane will vote for Rick.

Vote, Jane, vote!

“Don’t cry, Mitty, don’t cry,” says Jane.

Jane will vote for Rick because she is a farmer.

Farm, farm, farm.

Does Jane grow corn?

No, no, no.

Jane does not grow corn.

Does Jane grow vegetables?

No, no, no.

Jane does not grow vegetables.

Does Jane raise beef?

No, no, no.

Jane does not raise beef.

Well, how in the hell does Jane pay her bills?

Jane gets a check every month from the gummit.

Oh no, not the gummit! Is Jane a deadbeat?

No, no, no.

Jane cannot be a deadbeat.

Jane is not black.

Perhaps it’s because I am now just awakening to Du Bois’ work that I see the book in such a light. Perhaps that awakening colors my view, giving me wide-eyed wonder to a text that’s over a century old. Perhaps my middle-class, middle-aged whiteness, and my historical place in the Twenty-First Century, makes Du Bois’ work seem exotic and wonderful.

Perhaps.

But even as I’m awakening to Souls now, so too did America then, so too did the black folk themselves, “gifted with a second-sight in this American world” as Du Bois described it—“a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”

Blacks, Du Bois argued, should see for themselves. That seems so self-evident now that to even say it seems ridiculous.

In 1903, though, blacks were still groping their way through the strange landscape of post-Emancipation America. The four decades since the abolition of slavery—which Du Bois likened to the Israelites’ forty years in the desert before they found the land of Canaan—had proven to be a hard journey marked by continued bondage imposed by economics and enforced by prejudice. Yet the journey itself “changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect.”

His own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.

Du Bois could have been talking about himself. Souls provided the voice for that awakening—a voice respectful, assertive, and powerful.

Du Bois’ book represented a marked break from the black leadership of his time, as personified by Booker T. Washington. Washington advocated a policy of “conciliation toward the white South,” Du Bois said—a policy that required capitulation and accommodation. Such a policy, Du Bois contended, did not represent forward progress. It did not represent justice.

Souls opened a conversation that would evolve over two decades, finally culminating in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Du Bois, by then, was the leading black intellectual of his day, and his advocacy of black identity sparked one of America’s great creative and intellectual periods.

“It is a rare and intriguing moment when a people decide that they are the instruments of history-making and race-building,” wrote historian Nathan Huggins in his seminal 1972 study of the Harlem Renaissance. “[B]lack intellectuals in Harlem had just such a self-concept.”

Huggins’ examination lauded the intellectual and creative output of the period but ultimately judged the Renaissance a failure because it failed to translate into the kind of political traction that might’ve advanced race relations. It was based, he said, on “naïve assumptions about the centrality of culture, unrelated to economic and social realities.”

The great innocence of the renaissance is most clearly seen in the irony that, where its proponents had wanted to develop a distinctive Negro voice, they had been of necessity most derivative. It would have required a much more profound rejection of white values than was likely in the 1920s for Negroes to have freed themselves for creating the desired self-generating and self-confident Negro art.

Yet Huggins himself conceded that “the black-white relationship has been symbiotic; blacks have been essential to white identity (and whites to blacks).” He called the interdependence “profound.”

Du Bois had recognized it, too. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,” he wrote in Souls. “One ever feels this twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” It’s no wonder Du Bois’ book tapped into the racial subconscious.

It’s ironic that Huggins suggested that blacks of the Harlem Renaissance needed to embrace a “much more profound rejection of white values,” considering Du Bois suggested the same thing about Washington. While respectful of Washington, he was critical of Washington’s slow path.

Looking back today, though, one is hard-pressed to appreciate how difficult even Washington’s path was. When he dined at the White House with President Roosevelt in October of 1901, Washington stirred up such a furor that neither man dared a repeat dinner. So, from Huggins’ vantage point of the early 70s, at the tail-end of fifteen years of revolutionary Civil Rights convulsions, the Harlem Renaissance may have looked like slow progress, too; Du Bois may have looked conservative in his views.

As I look back on Huggins, Du Bois, and Washington, surrounded as they all are by the contexts of the Civil Rights movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the Tuskegee Institute, even the legacies of Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and John Brown—I can see stepping stones, building blocks, interdependence and interconnectedness. “[T]he problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” Du Bois wrote. I can see the path of that line tracing backwards.

I hear voices, see words, feel connected. I continue to awaken to my own role in that long dialogue. I understand, just a little better, the “souls of black folk”—and in doing so understand, too, my own.

I considered putting together a response on the Doyle article at the time, but I was buried with professional obligations. So I let it go. But then, this morning, I came across Alyssa Rosenberg‘s elegant critique of Doyle at ThinkProgress. Rosenberg, who also writes for The Atlantic and Loop21, characterizes the TigerBeatdown piece as “condescending and willfully misleading,” and she pulls no punches in explaining how Doyle has done a disservice to feminism’s mission of making the nerdosphere a more progressive place. Rosenberg is, on the whole, as measured and informed (and empathetic) as Doyle is childish and self-congratulatory, and I recommend that our readers spend a few minutes with both pieces so as to get a better handle on the debate.

I initially recoiled from the Doyle piece, and then walked away from it without comment, because I feel like I’ve been there before. Once upon a time, as a young MA student in English and Creative Writing, I found myself constantly shocked at the widespread inability by many of my colleagues to distinguish between author and narrator, something I was pretty good at by the time I graduated from high school. That may not adequately convey what I’m getting at, so let me put it this way: a lot of people seemed to believe that if you wrote about it, you were endorsing it. I encountered students of literature, who really ought to have known better before being allowed to graduate from a four-year college, who read Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and concluded that the author was a misogynist. The speaker in the poem – clearly a dramatis personae - was a psychopath, but Browning’s ability to crawl inside the mind of a murderer didn’t mark him as an artist with a keen insight into how dysfunctionality rationalized itself, it marked him as … a guy who fantasized about killing women?

At the time I blamed “reader-based” education, which seemed to say that if you read over something and don’t get it, it’s the writer’s fault. The post-structuralisms that this kind of foolishness derive from actually argue that the author doesn’t exist, so what the reader decides to do with a text is all that matters. I, of course, came from the opposite direction. Dr. Jim Booth had made very clear to me that if I didn’t get it, I needed to read it again and again until I did get it, and if I still didn’t get it I should ask someone smarter than me to explain it, because writers like Shakespeare and Donne and Milton (whom I still loathe, by the way) and Austen and Bronte knew what the hell they were doing. The discipline of this “writer-based” method has always served me well, especially when I have been surrounded by classmates whose laziness and deconstructionist sense of entitlement has presented me with a significant advantage.

But I digress. And if I’m not doing this perspective justice, forgive me, because it was so far out of touch with reality I had no idea what to make of it. Still don’t.

In any case, I never fully understood how, as a writer, I was supposed to go about crafting literature that showed how horrible something was without, you know, showing how horrible it was. And I rejected out of hand the notion that there were things that I couldn’t write about (because, as was pointed out to me on a daily basis, I was a white male, and hence was far more associated with the problem than the solution).

Doyle is correct in pointing out that Martin’s fantasy world is one where women don’t always fare well. Women are often treated as little more than chattel and there’s raping from one end of the narrative to the other. Her conclusion? Martin is “creepy.” He’s apparently projecting a milieu that he … approves of? Yearns for? My take is more along these lines: yeah, in the medieval world women were little more than chattel and there was raping from one end of Christendom to the other. If you depict a medieval world that is otherwise, you’re not really concerned with portraying the fact of things, are you?

However, there’s actually a lot more going on in Martin than “an airbrushed, dragon-infested Medieval” nerd paradise. We can talk about whether such tales are “fundamentally conservative” in the abstract, I suppose, but Rosenberg is relentless is dismantling the notion that Martin is any such thing.

It strikes me as oddly myopic to read a novel where literally every character makes grave strategic miscalculations as arguing that women’s bad decisions are caused by their lady bits. What’s interesting about A Song of Ice and Fire is that it depicts a world where norms and rules of engagement are shifting, rendering outcomes unpredictable for men and women alike. There is no man who seems like a more gifted rule or powerful strategic thinker than any given woman in Westeros or Essos, except perhaps Doran Martell and Varys, neither of whose plans have come to fruition yet, so it’s a bit too soon to tell. But it is telling that Sady entirely omits from her analysis Ygritte, Jon Snow’s lover, who keeps him alive when he’s failing to integrate with the wildlings; Melisandre, who is the most powerful religious figure in the novels and the only advisor who manages to keep her ruler on a trajectory that’s both strategic and moral; the Sand Snakes, powerful, aggressive Dornish women who are setting out to set various parts of Doran’s plan in action; Asha Greyjoy, by far the most strategically intelligent person in the Iron Islands; and Meera Reed, who manages to keep Bran, Hodor, and her brother alive on their quest to find the three-eyed crow; that she ignores that Brienne of Tarth is the highest living exemplar of chivalric ideals.

I have only gotten through the first book of the series so far, so Rosenberg’s depth of analysis far exceeds my own, but what she says strikes me as being accurate. Martin is taking on a genre that has been flogged to death ever since Tolkien, and having read a great deal of fantasy myself, I greatly appreciated the ways in which Martin has set out to reform the game a bit. His commitment to character development is unlike anything I have seen in fantasy in a very long time, if ever, and if you can count on anything, it’s that as soon as he introduces a type, he will shortly get to work expanding, deconstructing, betraying and blowing up your expectations.

Perhaps it’s no accident that the other thing I have been reading lately is Terry Pratchett’s hilarious and deadly insightful Discworld series, which raises irreverence for the conventions of a genre to an art form. He and Martin strike me as coming at the same set of questions from different directions, but the composite effect is twofold. First, they cast a bright light on the limitations of what so much popular fantasy has become (were Doyle’s outrage leveled at the genre in general, I’d be a lot more onboard with her). And second, they illustrate, as Rosenberg notes about Martin, the value inherent in casting certain kinds of issues against a backdrop where we can more readily focus on the possibilities in the dynamic.

The medieval era is a useful setting, because the conflicts are smaller enough than our contemporary ones that it’s possible to imagine that a single character can have an impact on the outcome, but big enough to feel that said impact is meaningful.

I don’t know George Martin, and as a newcomer to his writing I can’t pretend to even be an authority on his texts. But one book in, he strikes me as anything but a sexist or a misogynist or some kind of übernerd imprisoned in a Frank Frazetta-illustrated psychic prison. On the contrary, he comes off as a writer who’s aware of the gender role limitations women face in society. Why else would he devote such energy to the role of women in Westeros, and why would he invest so much energy in characters like Arya? Why would he set us up with such a fierce compare and contrast case as Cersei Lannister and Catelyn Stark, letting us ponder the agency with which they each assault the circumstances that a brutal patriarchy have woven around their lives? William Gibson (another male nerd writer with a keen interest in the role of women in our culture) observed that science fiction is never about the future, it’s about the present. By the same token, fantasy is never about there, it’s about here.

The same seems true of Pratchett, who presents us not only with strong women confronting a man’s world, but also women who, while perhaps not instinctively powerful alpha types, are nonetheless striving for a measure of authenticity in their lives that transcends cultural prescriptions. He also has no fear of going a step further and embedding some of these women in contexts complicated by class limitations, as well (I’m still trying to sort through Glenda, one of the protagonists in Unseen Academicals, but she’s a strong working-class woman who seems to be trying to understand how to be strong in an authentic, rather than clichéd fashion).

I’m glad that there are aggressive thinkers in our culture who are willing to invest in things like improving the nerdosphere. But I’m also uneasy when critiques are uninformed and lazy. Sexism is bad. Irresponsible allegations of sexism do more to hurt the progressive cause, though, because they provide ammunition for the reactionary noise machine, which likes nothing more than to portray feminists as shrill, out-of-touch radicals. You’ve heard Rush Limbaugh, so you know what I’m talking about here.

Thanks to Alyssa Rosenberg for approaching this debate with a hefty measure of intelligence and perspective. Doyle may have been one step back, but Rosenberg has taken us two steps forward, which means it’s been a pretty good day.

Click here to view the embedded video.

By 2042, whites of European descent will no longer comprise a majority in the US. So let’s take a moment to celebrate the melting pot with Los Lobos and “One Time One Night.” Woody would have loved this band and this song.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Happy Independence Day, everyone.

Okay, that’s not precisely true. There has been a bit of comment and analysis. But so far, no controversy. No homophobic ranting, no athletes stepping up to say that Jesus doesn’t approve, none of that. This is a wonderful thing. That the public response so far has amount to a collective shoulder shrug is evidence that America is finally getting over the idea that sports just isn’t ready for gays in the locker room.

That’s what sports talker Jim Rome said back in 2007, when former NBA player John Amaechi came out, and at the time I sort of agreed with him. Subsequent dumbassery from Tim Hardaway and LeBron James lent credibility to Rome’s argument, although perhaps we were underestimating locker room culture because it is by no means clear that Hardaway and The Decision represented a majority viewpoint even at that time.

In any case, we may now be on the verge of a tipping point regarding gay athletes. As today’s Washington Post column from Mike Wise notes: “sports has undergone a very gay spring.”

First the Lakers’ Kobe Bryant was hit with a $100,000 fine for uttering a gay slur at a referee, an incident Bryant later called a “teaching moment” as he and the club partnered with a gay-rights group to educate others.

Then, there was the New York Rangers’ Sean Avery’s endorsement ad for the Human Rights Campaign’s “New Yorkers for Marriage Equality Campaign,” an instigator in the most testosterone-laden of sports, no less.

Over the weekend, Grant Hill and Jared Dudley, coincidentally two Phoenix Suns players, participated in an NBA public service announcement that denounced the use of the term “gay” as acceptable trash talk on the playground.

It was also revealed that former Villanova player Will Sheridan came out to teammates during his career with the Wildcats, with no ramifications whatsoever.

There’s more. Just announced yesterday: “The San Francisco Giants will become the first professional sports team to jump into the burgeoning anti-homophobia campaign with an upbeat ‘It Gets Better’ video designed to bring hope to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender young people.” And while Atlanta Braves pitching coach Roger McDowell unleashed a homophobic tirade against some Giants fans, which is bad, his actions earned him a two-week unpaid vacation to reflect on how he might be a better citizen in the future. That the institutions of the sports world are implementing zero-tolerance policies is a welcome development, to say the least.

Wise interviewed NBA Hall of Fame player and popular TNT analyst Charles Barkley for that story, and Chuck’s thoughts should go a long way toward dispelling the myth that jocks cannot and will not abide an openly gay teammate. Barkley, who just a few days ago praised Sean Avery’s support for gay marriage rights, doesn’t mince words in explaining the salient points:

• On two of the three teams he played for he had teammates he knew were gay.
• It was no big deal.
• They were professionals who contributed to the betterment of the team.
• Talent matters more than sexual orientation.

“I’d rather have a gay guy who can play than a straight guy who can’t play.”

So, how many gays are there in America’s pro locker rooms, anyway? In the 2007 post I link above, I ran some numbers.

Estimates for how many gays there are in the US vary wildly, but it looks like the most reliable number for men is in the 2.8% range. So let’s take that as our working estimate.

There are 32 NFL teams, and each carries around 60 players. So that’s 1920.

30 NBA teams, 12-man rosters: 360 players.

There are 30 Major League Baseball franchises (if you count the Colorado Rockies) and they have 25-man rosters for the bulk of the season. So that’s 750.

NHL teams dress a 20-man rosters for each game, and there are 30 teams, so that’s another 600.

Note: I’m being conservative here. If you factor in practice squads, injury lists, minor league call-ups and the like these numbers get significantly larger. But for the sake of discussion, let’s just stick with active roster numbers and see what happens.

By my math, this means we can expect the following to be about right:

• NFL: 54 gay players
• NBA: 10 gay players
• MLB: 21 gay players
• NHL: 17 gay players
• Total in “Big 4″ American sports leagues: 102 active gay players

I don’t know that Sir Charles has done the math, but he clearly understands the reality:

“Any professional athlete who gets on TV or radio and says he never played with a gay guy is a stone-freakin’ idiot,” Barkley said. “I would even say the same thing in college. Every college player, every pro player in any sport has probably played with a gay person.”

Perhaps the two most refreshing insights of the interview came when Barkley linked discrimination against gays to other forms of discrimination and then fingered those responsible.

“First of all, society discriminates against gay people,” Barkley said. “They always try to make it like jocks discriminate against gay people. I’ve been a big proponent of gay marriage for a long time, because as a black person, I can’t be in for any form of discrimination at all.”

…

“The first people who whine and complain is them Bible-thumpers, who are supposed to be non-judgmental, who rail against them. [emphasis added]

As I said back in December, it’s only a matter of time before a major star comes out of the closet. Thanks to the courage of people like John Amaeche, Dave Kopay, Roy Simmons, Esera Tuaolo, Glenn Burke, Billy Bean, Dave Pallone, Rick Welts and dozens of others, I expect the furor to last about five minutes – and that will be due to the “major star,” not the “gay.”

Meanwhile, thank the gods for smart, no-BS media personalities like Charles Barkley, huh? I don’t know that he ever set out to establish himself as a progressive cultural icon, but he always does his best to tell the truth. And, as they say, the truth shall set you free.

_____

Also, if you have a minute, read Frank DeFord’s comments today on gay athletes coming out at NPR.

• In this case, in earlier editions of GOP Madness, I suggested Pawlenty would have some trouble getting away from previous positions of his, and sure enough I saw him on TV a few days ago, admitting he’d made mistakes and begging for a mulligan. Well, the latest polls are out and it looks like the voters will give him a mulligan, but they ain’t gonna elect him president. As expected, he’s dragging up the rear, way behind Romney, Gingrich, Huckabee and the real contenders.
• I also suggested that Trump was the clown in a little car sent out to warm up the crowd before the real acts entered the ring. Sure enough, the Republicans finally realized they were being punked, and dumped him straight to the bottom of the polls. I am not sure they ever would have gotten it if Obama had not eviscerated him at the White House Correspondents dinner.  But they are smart enough to know that Obama is smart enough that he’s not going to give his real competitors any free advertising. (Yes, Tim, he did mention you. You too, Michelle.)
• And finally, Slimy Newt decided to clean up his image of being a philandering adulterous slug by trotting out his third wife, a devout Catholic with whom he had an affair with while he was married to someone else. Even as we speak the needles on the irony-meters located in the secret Sandia Laboratories deep beneath the New Mexico desert are pegged into the red zone.

Whee! What fun, and the beer cart hasn’t even come around yet.

Ahem, but this is a serious blog site and there is serious business to be done here. First, the Niedermeyer Bracket results. Pawlenty or Santorum or Thune or Hannity?

Now this is a toughie, not just because they are all clones of each other, but because the right answer is probably “none of the above.” I am going to go with a bit of an upset here and say Santorum.

I just can’t see how to market Pawlenty. Brands matter in politics and there are established brands that always play well. McCain: Feisty war hero who’s not afraid to tell the truth no matter what it costs him. Palin: Uneducated but lots of common sense maverick from the backwoods. No matter that neither brand was exactly true, or that both were ripped off from the movies– Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart respectively. Their brands enabled you to put them into neat slots in your brain, exactly as branding is intended to do. What slot does Pawlenty go into? Gray? Day old oatmeal? Mittens?

Santorum has a brand, one borrowed from the Inquisition, but a brand: Scourge of the morally loose, e.g., gays .

So Santorum, in a mudslide.

The Cruella De Ville Bracket

Finally, the one we’ve all been waiting for. Drum roll please. Palin or Bachmann or Haley or Ingraham?

Before we get started, there’s something we need to deal with. In June of 2009, Guy Cimbalo wrote an article for Playboy on the top 10 Republican women he’d like to have “hatesex” with. Most readers on both sides of the political spectrum interpreted “hatesex” as a euphemism for rape, and Playboy immediately pulled the article and put the editor who approved it into witness protection. Unfortunately, because Cimbalo let his inner teenage asshole get too close to the keyboard, everyone missed that he was making a pretty interesting point: Prominent Republican women are, in the main, exceptionally attractive and play to that attractiveness. (The picture that accompanies this blog is Michelle Malkin delivering political commentary dressed as a teen cheerleader.)

Let’s be honest, it’s not that easy to name ten attractive political figures in any genre:

• Republican men—well, there’s Scott Brown and then there’s…. How old is Arnold now?
• Democrat men—Obama and…… Hmmm. How about John-John? He’s dead? Darn. Well, then. Hey, is Scott Brown a Democrat? Are you sure?
• Democrat women?

YOU try it. Make a list of ten well-known calendar-worthy politicians or political types of any cut. It’s impossible. Except for Republican women.

A disproportionate share of female Republican political types are not just nice looking, but are head snapping, pheromone triggering, tie-straightening attractive. The obvious hypothesis is that Republican manhood is threatened by any woman that does not conform to rigid and well-defined stereotypes, and in essence, women who would succeed on the right must disguise themselves to be successful. Or maybe, due to a strange warp in the space time continuum, serious Republican women have more hours in the day than Democrat women. For some reason, they can balance career, family, church, analysis of policy documents, and still have four hours a day to spend in the gym and at the beauty parlor. Nah, I am going with the manhood hypothesis.

There’s a doctoral thesis or two in there somewhere.

But no time for that. On to the candidate capsules.

Sarah Palin. If you’ve read other blog posts of mine, you know by now that I am not a Sarah fan. It comes down to a species thing. One of us is a dog and the other a cat. I call myself meritocratic, which is a nice way of saying I believe the world should be run by the intelligent elite. Were her vocabulary up to it, Sarah probably would also consider herself a meritocrat, with merit defined as evangelical faith paired with “common sense,” which is a nice way of saying superstitious ignorance. Still, there’s a lot to admire about this woman. She’s tough, tenacious, and courageous enough to bring a Down ’s Syndrome baby into the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she left the governorship in the middle of it, but come on: If your choice was to live in Wasilla wearing longjohns in June and selling snowmobiles or be on TV in LA and make a gazillion dollars, what would you do? I thought so. Here’s the line for the tourney: Lot of baggage here, but she’s surprised us before.

Michele Bachmann. Superficially, Bachmann seems a lot like Sarah — Tea Party, strident, dumb, insanely ambitious, and prone to say stuff that is batshit crazy. In fact, though, these two are pretty different. Bachmann is educated, has a long track record of public service, is deep in the issues, and appears to come at many of her policy positions at least as much from an political or ideological logic as from a religious one. (Other positions, like her take on climate disruption, she gets from sitting at a Ouija board with her Labrador retriever.) She should be pretty darn formidable as a candidate. And would be, if she weren’t a loud-mouthed microphone-grabber hated even by those on her own side. Not as young as she looks (or nearly as young as Sarah,) there’s the faint reek of desperation about the current run. Time and gravity are not kind to the beautiful. The tournament line: Hard to see her playing well outside the Tea Party base. Too many stupid quotes in the public domain. Will also suffer from being seen as a Nissan to Sarah’s Toyota.

Nikki Haley. Most American ship owners do not register their ships in the U.S., but instead use Panama or Liberia or the Marshall Islands as “flags of convenience.” It’s easy to envisage Indian-American politicians like Piyush Jindal and Nikki Haley studying late in their rooms during high school, reading about flags of convenience, and light bulbs going on above their ambitious little heads. Or maybe it’s just coincidence that their parents are Hindu and Sikh while Piyush and Nikki are Catholic and Christian, respectively, the same as the voters in the states where they run for office. Oh well, they’re not the first—Nikki could also have gotten the idea from Harry Reid. Tourney line: Dangerous but untested. Too new to have baggage. Beautiful, young, smart by right wing standards. Still goes to Sikh religious ceremonies, which wasn’t a problem in S.C., but could be an issue up against some Christian candidates.

Laura Ingraham. To beat a dead horse, Ingraham is of a type. In this case, that type is a late forties Ivy League undergrad, public law school blond Connecticut firebrand who used to date Dinesh D’Souza and is famous for saying outrageous and untrue things on her radio show. Just like Ann Coulter. Of course, there are subtle differences. Coulter got her start with unfounded attacks on liberals, while Ingraham got hers outing “Sodomites,” secretly taping kids who belonged to a gay rights organization and sending the recordings to their parents. Although, people who live in walk-in closets shouldn’t throw shoes, and it’s been widely speculated that Ingraham has some issues of her own. Perhaps that’s why she has now toned the gay-bashing down, but she is still known as the “high priestess of hate radio.” At least Rush, Sean and Glenn can fall back on the excuse that they are uneducated louts and don’t really know any better. Ingraham can’t. Maybe education in this country really is failing. Line: Too nasty for even the Republicans. Her parents probably hug her with tongs.

All rightee then. Does Sarah have staying power? Can Michelle ride her Tea Party horse out of Sarah’s long shadow? Is Nikki ready for the big time? Could Laura hold herself together through the stress of a campaign or would she implode like a beach ball at a porcupine party?

It’s time to vote!