Cory Robin and I go way back. We were in a political discussion together where the hot topic was the WTO protests in Seattle—the “Occupy” movement of 1998. Since then, I’ve always been a deep admirer of his essays; if he’s saved his emails from the intervening fifteen years, I’m sure he’d find a bunch from me praising his various pieces from the London Review of Books when they came out. I was thrilled to learn he was collecting his pieces into a book. I was even more thrilled when I read it and saw how he was able to link them together into a coherent argument which—well, read my blurb on the book…

Is Mitt Romney the best of all possible GOP candidates?

Karen Handel, the Sarah Palin acolyte who appears bent on bringing-to-Gilead the Komen Foundation if she doesn’t ruin its reputation first, is not simply opposed to Planned Parenthood and its “babykilling” practices. She’s the whole Palin package: she opposes marriage equality, and she opposes adoption by same-sex couples, too. All dressed up in a campaign for ethical reform of government by the ‘good ole boys.’

When then-President Richard Nixon sat down at the piano on the stage of the Grand Old Opry in 1974, he was reinforcing a conservative, polemical wall of sound to help contain several decades of transformational popular music, from blues and jazz to rock & roll. Music was the last thing on his mind.

As part of his notorious race-based “southern strategy,” Nixon led the efforts of conservative elites to co-opt American country-western music. He got the idea from George Wallace’s 1968 campaign, which Wallace had filled with country stars like Hank Snow and Hank Williams Jr.

Hey, you know what conservatives really really hate? Conservatives just can’t stand it when rich people and corporations use their vast wealth to game the system! Just don’t ask them to support any kind of public campaign financing or limits on corporate political spending…

A group of Iowaninions, frustrated with the current occupants of the Republican Clown Car (2012 or bust!), are making a pitch for a new candidate to save them from the socialist who will shove government healthcare down everyone’s throats (we’re speaking, of course, about Mitt Romney) so they have purchased radio time on many of Iowa’s radio stations to urge Ioweens to vote “rogue.”

It wasn’t clear if “direct Newt interaction” came with a happy ending.

Crude Awakening explains the growing pains and tribulations of a new state coming of age in the modern era – a state of wilderness, and Sourdoughs, thousands of years of Native culture, fishermen, prospectors and pioneers, brilliant minds and brave souls writing their own Constitution. In some ways comparable to the spirit of newness, hope and optimism of Philadelphia in the 1830s, Alaska’s coming out party had a darker and more raucous side.

With Halloween coming up on Monday, there’s going to be a lot of grown-ups attending masquerade parties this weekend. Which, unfortunately, has meant a lot of long, last-minute lines in crowded costume stores — including the one in Washington, D.C., where all the Republican presidential candidates went shopping earlier this week.

Man, just when the Secessionist needed a life preserver — she throws him an anvil.