To people here in Missouri, Akin’s comments were not terribly surprising. Akin is a known commodity — known to be highly conservative and well in keeping with a non-trivial slice of the Missouri electorate.

Like Br’er Rabbit telling Br’er Fox not to throw him in the briar patch, Claire McCaskill ran ads on Fox News during the GOP primary fight, calling Akin “too conservative for Missouri”. With an endorsement like that, conservatives in the GOP primary race were happy to hand Akin a victory with 36% of the vote.

Rhonda, the heroine of Mary Pauline Lowry’s magical novel, The Earthquake Machine, is a young woman lost in the borderlands of late adolescence, family dysfunction, sexual identity and the mysteries of love, desire and friendship. On a river trip with friends and chaperones along a real borderland, the Rio Grande, Rhonda lights out for the territories – in this case, into Mexico.

I wish this was some kind of a joke. The publishers of the next edition of Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn plan to replace the “n” word with “slave.” In my book, changing loaded, powerful words in a literary classic to better “express it in the 21st century” is no better than George Lucas “updating” the original Star Wars films to some bastardized, unrecognizable iteration of itself.

America has a Credulity Crisis. It’s not that we have too little of it, it’s that we have way too much, and a credulity glut is the last thing a democracy needs.

It is all the fashion in Washington, D.C. One simply must sport a terrible dislike for Social Security and wish with all one’s heart that the money be given instead to the very, very rich, where it will become, I guess, High Society Security.

Mark Twain said that in his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck’s sound heart defeated the deformed consciences of Tom and society. But America loves its Tom Sawyers. The question is, can Barack Obama win as Huck Finn?