What are we doing back in Hampton Roads, twice in one week? Today, checking on the future of health care:

Amanda Rooker doesn’t pay for health insurance. Instead, she pays a monthly share to cover other people’s health bills.

It’s part of a medical bill sharing program called Medi-Share, which claims an exemption from federal health reform’s individual mandate. Under the exemption, members of healthcare sharing ministries — organizations where members share financial resources to pay one another’s medical costs — are not required to carry insurance by 2014 or face penalties, according to Medi-Share.

I was a member of a similar organization when I owned my first horse, as a way of refilling the pot if my appaloosa went hooves-up some day, a trick horses are too well known for. The group was 1,000 strong or so, and when anyone’s animal died, everyone paid $5 and the owner collected $5,000. It’s a crude form of insurance, as is Medi-Share, which works the same way. Rooker joined because she can’t afford to join her husband’s employer-provided plan. The photo with the article was instructive, with dad sitting at one end of the couch with the couple’s two little boys on his lap (safe on the insurance ship) and mom at the other end (paddling her tippy little canoe alongside).

But she’s cool with Medi-Save, because she’s now far more motivated to practice “self-care and natural remedies,” and has only had to submit one bill to the group. Of course, she’s also 35. Barring an unlucky accident, family history or other catastrophe, most people are in the best health of their lives at 35. Medi-Save is also overtly Christian, and has a few stipulations:

Members must sign a statement of faith professing faith in Jesus Christ and agree not to engage in sex outside of traditional Christian marriage, use tobacco or illegal drugs or abuse legal drugs or alcohol.

They also can’t use the service for birth control, abortions or boob jobs. And Rooker also acknowledges it’s not for everyone:

“I don’t think it would work well for people who have babies or small children who want to have their immunizations and well checks,” she added.

No, I guess not. In general, it sounds like it wouldn’t work very well for anyone other than an essentially healthy Christian married woman who doesn’t want new breasts. I wonder what the group assessment would be for, say, breast cancer. Story doesn’t say. Rooker thinks more people should look into groups like Medi-Save, because it’s such a good idea.

Mark my words: As we divide into two countries, haves and have-nots, we’re going to see more of this sort of thing. I’m simultaneously heartened that at least someone is looking at an alternative to outrageously expensive health insurance and depressed that this is what it’s come to in the wealthiest nation in the world. I once had a boss who wore a large scar on his jawline, the result, he said, of having a childhood laceration repaired by a veterinarian. Which was all his parents could afford when he was young. I’ve actually read conservative commentators saying this is as it should be, that we should be prepared to handle most non-traumatic health-care at home, the way the early settlers did. I look forward to learning basic suturing and bone-setting skills at a for-profit do-it-yourself school, maybe part of the Halliburton family of companies. Or maybe my vet can show me a few tricks.

So, a little bloggage on a morning when the sun is late to work but winter is right behind:

Jay Rosen, speaking the dang truth about Andrew Breitbart, and why news organizations need to stop being so goddamn stupid.

Meet the people who will be keeping Jon Stewart in high cotton for the next few years.

I need an OID palate-cleanser…OK, here’s one: We have the world’s stupidest criminals.

No, wait, a real one, from Coozledad:

We were fortunate she never walked in on us during a waxing October moon, but she did crash our marijuana-enhanced viewing of Around the World in Eighty Days- a fairly long movie, which she stayed for- and talked ceaselessly throughout.

Her speech was a hybrid of Southern Virginia glottal vowels and a unique fetal-alcoholic disregard of consonants that made me wish David Niven would leap out of the screen and throttle her for murdering his tongue.

Coozledad, the universe is telling you something, and it’s this: WRITE A BOOK.

And with that, I’m going to the gym, and then I’m going to write something I want to write. Dunno what, yet. Just going to turn off the modem and see what comes up.

Well, that was interesting.

[Koff.]

I expect we all know what we want to talk about, and the bar is open. A few thoughts:

* As always, things didn’t go entirely as planned for anyone. Angle, O’Donnell, Paladino, et al. Whatever coattails those stupid colonial-Williamsburg tea party outfits had, they didn’t extend all the way to the insane asylum.

* Still, very bad for Obama. This makes 2012 look pretty grim. On the other hand, don’t underestimate anyone or anything. For once, Maureen Dowd is instructive.

* The challenge, once you’ve gotten a job you’ve fought hard for, is to do it well. But I don’t believe for a minute the GOP intends to do any job in Washington other than making Barack Obama a one-term president. They don’t have a plan for health care; that’s been made abundantly clear over the past year. They don’t have a plan for the economy other than to cut taxes and blame the ensuing deficits on Obama. They don’t even have a legislative plan, other than to “cut federal spending,” except for Medicare, Social Security, defense, et al.

* Rand Paul — what a piece of work. Swaggering, arrogant, the contemporary embodiment of the mine owners who told their employees how lucky they were to get to shop in such a clean company store. Kind of an argument for battered wife syndrome at the state level.

* Dear Evan Joe Lieberman Bayh: Shut up.

* What is Michael Gerson so put out about? Tom Tancredo speaks for his people. As the lady in touch with Real America knows.

As for me, I need to pull together something for my other gig. Interesting results there — the moderate Democrat representing us in the Michigan House, the first one ever in the history of our district, kept his seat, and delivered a thumpin’ to his Republican opponent, in a year when something else entirely should have happened. Hmm. Of course, Rick Snyder won the governor’s office, as expected. Which means the tax incentives for filmmaking are dead. It was fun while it lasted, but it never lasts long.

Calvin Stovall is a former colleague of mine, now editor-in-chief of the Binghamton Press in New York. He recently lowered the Sword of Justice upon his newspaper’s comment sections. You think your life is sad and pathetic? Getta loada this:

We had to remove racist and insensitive comments on a story about the birth of the first baby of 2010 in Broome County, born to a black woman. Just Monday, I had staffers take down comments on a story about a motorcyclist killed in an accident involving a school bus and a minivan in Kirkwood.

During the past three weeks, I banned three people for life from our site because of abuses, including attacks on one another and racist comments. They returned to the site under different usernames. We confirmed who they were and blocked them again, and we will continue to do so until they get the message that they’re not welcome on our site.

First, imagine being the sort of person who feels the need to comment on a first-baby-of-the-year story. I’d imagine being banned for those shenanigans would be the Scorsesean camera-pulls-back moment that momentarily puts you outside your life and allows you to briefly observe it from, say, a high corner in your room: Yep, that’s me all right, rockin’ the Dell laptop. Boy, the way I type really rattles the card table, doesn’t it? And that bare lightbulb — none of those socialist twisty things for me! Kiss my ass, Mr. born-in-Kenya Obama!

(On second thought, you always run the risk that, once outside himself, your readers will like what they see.)

Internet eggheads are always telling lamestream journalists that they have to jump into their comment sections. Many of them run sites where the comment sections are kind of like our own here at NN.C, rich and smart and, to continue my oft-used Cheers metaphor, a place where everybody knows your name, there’s a fire in the hearth and the bowls of peanuts are always full and warm.

There’s another kind of bar out there. It’s where alcoholics line up to get a drink at the earliest possible opening hour. It smells bad, no one talks and the toilets frequently overflow. This is what newspaper comment sections are. I really can’t blame someone like Calvin, who has enough to do just getting the paper out, from wanting to engage with the sorts of pinheads who would, once banned from the worst bar in the world, try to sneak a way back in, re-registering under new user names, so that people can hear their thoughts on the skin color of the first baby of the new year.

Partly it’s a function of size — the more people you let in, the worse it gets. Our own community got some new members after the Goeglein affair, but I think the quality stayed high, even as some of our best people left (farewell and adieu, Danny, Marcia, Gasman, many others) and were replaced by newcomers. I sometimes find myself at a loss for words when people ask what this blog is about. Is it political? Sometimes, but that’s not its purpose. Pop culture? Same answer. Personal, a diary? Kinda, but not really, no. So what is it? It’s just a place where I drink my morning coffee and work the kinks out of my fingers, but even on days when I’m not particularly present, the best reading is in the comments.

Once again, thanks to all you readers, silent and otherwise. I lift a glass to you, and the next round is on the house.

So, election day. I haven’t voted yet, but I will. There aren’t a ton of seats at play locally, but there are some — governor, state house and senate seats, and my local school board. The latter races have kept me hopping over at my other site, and just because there’s never enough to do that you can’t do a little bit more, yesterday’s police rounds were ridonkulous, a side effect of Halloween, I guess. Reading over my report, I’m kicking myself for not connecting the “29 minors” rousted from an underage drinking party to the Chilean miners, somehow — that could have generated some yuks. But in a week when the file offers you an actual scene from a Cheech & Chong movie, you take the low-hanging fruit.

So, off to the gym and the polls. No real bloggage today, but there’s this — the awful, no-good health care law that’s actually bringing health insurance to small-business employees.

Civic duty! Onward!

Halloween was forecast to be chillier this year than in years past, and I overbought candy. I forget how many bags, but it was two heavy sacks from Target, at least $50 worth. I had way, way too much, so I opened one bag and had three miniature Snickers. Kate had about that many miniature Reese’s. We both nibbled on the Starburst, for a grand total loss of maybe 2 percent in gross payload, maybe less.

Then I turned on the porch light at 5:30 p.m. Buzz Lightyear arrived at 5:40, and by 7:10 I was completely cleaned out. Every year, I forget how crazy it is. Hundreds of kids, easily. I enforced the one-to-a-customer rule almost unilaterally, with a few exceptions for exceptionally cute costumes. Didn’t put Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on the iPod speakers, as I had to start work at 6, so I sat on the porch in my lawn chair, laptop open, farming pharma-news, passing out candy. Because that’s how you gotta roll when you’re a work-at-home editor whose family deserted her on the one night of the year the doorbell will ring 200 times.

A few notes to consult for next year:

1) Buy more candy. There is no such thing as too much.
2) Snickers are totally over. One kid in 10 prefers them over Reese’s Cups. It’s time to admit to yourself why you buy them, you pig.
3) The two-bowl system — chocolate and fruit groups — is a winner.
4) It’s just not Halloween without Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

A majority of our trick-or-treaters are “non-residents,” as polite people say in Grosse Pointe. There are more African Americans living here than there have been in the past, but not as many as we see on Halloween, and the circling cars dropping off and picking up kids sort of underline it. This happened in Fort Wayne, too, and it used to bug me. It doesn’t anymore. If your own neighborhood offers a paucity of candy, come on down to mine. All are welcome on my porch.

The stupidest story to turn up on the world’s Health pages last night: Avoid Halloween candy hazards, from the Los Angeles Times Online. No, it’s not about poison and razor blades; even the most dull-witted editors have stopped beating that dead horse. No, it’s about the hazards of “digestive upset,” “choking hazards” and “damage to orthodontia.” It contains some helpful tips you have probably never considered: “Feed them a healthy dinner before they go out so they’re not as tempted to snack,” and “Limit kids to about two pieces a day from their stash of goodies, or have them trade in their candy for a toy, book or family outing.”

As my husband often says, “Where would we be without newspapers to remind us to wear sunscreen?” The author of this groundbreaking piece, Alison Johnson, seems to specialize in this sort of thing. When I googled her name and home newspaper, the Hampton Roads Daily Press, I got another tips piece, on how to get through your child’s first haircut. Tip: Take a comfort item. (” If kids are nervous, let them hold a favorite stuffed animal, toy or blanket.” Forehead smack. I never would have thought of that!) Don’t miss the classic “how to eat to stay cooler,” either. Tip No. 1: Eat smaller, lighter meals.

Eh. On to the bloggage, it’s manic Monday:

The NYT explains Theatre Bizarre. Yes, the words “outré” and “leitmotif” appear.

Elizabeth Warren, Obama’s best hope to win back the masses. At least, NYMag seems to think so.

P.S. The auto bailout worked. Why doesn’t anyone know this?

Finally, the Washington Post looks into the crystal ball, post marijuana legalization. Worth your time.

Me, I must run.

Take your seats, class. Pop quiz:

Here is a transcription of a Facebook posting made by Cliff McCance, a Midland, Arkansas school board member, as presented by CBS News.

For reference, here is a screen capture of the very same posting, as presented in the Advocate. I advise taking at least a peek at this, so you can see the picture of the guy posing with a largemouth bass. In Arkansas, I don’t think any other single image would so indelibly establish his good ol’ boy credentials.

What you’re looking at is a question news editors wrestle with often. The posting is riddled with errors. How many do you fix?

In this case, the mistakes are mostly missing punctuation, which is forgivable. At least, it’s something we have to tolerate, at a time when so many people “write” on tiny smartphone keyboards. My own smartphone is pretty smart, and automatically changes “Ill” to “I’ll,” which I’m grateful for 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent I’m irritated, as I meant to write “Ill I am at the thought of eating pasta for the third night in a row.” But in general, it’s pretty damn smart. If only it had a caps lock key, so I could YELL MORE in my text messages to Kate. But I digress.

The biggest booboo was this: McCance wrote, “We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed thereselves because of their sin. REALLY PEOPLE.”

What do you do with something like that? Run it by itself, run it with the fancypants (sic), or fix it? I think you run it, but I’m unsure on the siccing, so to speak. McCance is, after all, on a school board. He sets policy governing education in his community. And he says “thereselves.” Among many other sins.

As I think I’ve noted here before, once upon a time Ohio had a good ol’ boy for governor, big Jim Rhodes, and the papers routinely polished his mangled Appalachian-inflected English. Before TV was most voters’ primary window onto a candidate, they could get away with it. Every time he said the name of our state — Ahia — my nerves would jangle, but you all know what an elitist I am.

Do you even notice McCance’s usage? Does anyone other than our little smartypants tribe care? I’m with Gin and Tacos. I think it’s ghastly.

It goes without saying that what McCance actually said was far worse, but he’s already resigned on that score, under the terrible withering gaze of Anderson Cooper. A.C. wields the gay Sword of Justice.

No jokes, please.

If it’s Wednesday, Thursday or Friday morning, I’m late for something. We’re pulling the boat today, I have a meeting, and I need to get dressed. So let’s go bloggage:

Coozledad had the last word in the last thread’s comments on this matter, and I think he said it succinctly and well: Pubic hair a deal-breaker? It’s a wonder fratboys get fucked anywhere outside the hazing room. Yes, exactly!

Have a great weekend and fun Halloween. And stay out of the Reese’s Cups!

Moe et al, take note: The New York Times has parachutes on the ground in Defiance, Ohio. I always wanted to see this, maybe in a movie: A gathering on the village green…the sound of a low-flying aircraft, all eyes look up and see THREE SKYDIVERS descending, and soon they land — a WRITER, a PHOTOGRAPHER and a MULTI-PLATFORM NEW MEDIA GRAPHIC ARTIST. As the trio gather their PARACHUTES, the townspeople approach. The WRITER steps forward and extends a hand.

Anyway, the Times is, was, in my husband’s hometown. I read him the headline, Democratic Ohio Town Loosens Its Party Ties and we both sort of scratched our heads. Defiance is Democratic? Maybe in the ’60s. Maybe when the UAW still had something to swing. But as far as I can tell, the little D is the textbook example of the Reagan-era strategy of the GOP — get working- and middle-class blue-collar types to vote against their own economic interests through strategic dog-whistle “values” issues. Despite a move toward blue in 2008, it’s still in no danger of holding a gay pride parade anytime soon. However, don’t let that get in the way of the temperature-taking:

Will Parker, 24, finished college in 2009 with a degree in marketing and communications. In six months of looking, he found no work here in his hometown and had to take a Web-page job in Columbus, 115 miles to the southeast, that he feels is a dead end. Mr. Parker voted for Mr. Obama and said he now felt “voter’s remorse” because “it feels like we’re creating a welfare state.”

OK, first: Will? If you’re looking for work in marketing and communication, you’re looking in the wrong place. Generally speaking, towns of fewer than 20,000 souls don’t support much work in that field, even less so in recent years. Even Fort Wayne saw the loss of small ad shops and related jobs in the post-internet crash, as business consolidated in places like Chicago. If you desire that small-city lifestyle, Will, you should have picked a different major, and if you feel you’re in a dead end at 24, you lack imagination. Among many other things.

The rest of the story has that cognitive dissonance I hear so often these days, people who think that stimulus-funded bridge being built down the street is a great idea, but OMG health care! “Rammed down our throats,” was the phrase employed by, get this, an insurance agent. Yes, a woman who sells insurance frets about a bill that requires Americans to buy insurance. She’s probably worried about the death panels. They also dislike the bank bailout, but that of General Motors, which provides the highest-paying jobs in town? Mumble, mumble.

And this?

Local suspicion of government has also been fueled, (Mayor) Armstrong said, by a costly federal mandate to build a sewage system to protect the Great Lakes, requiring huge increases in local water rates.

Good lord, they were talking about that in Fort Wayne — upriver on the same waterway that flows through Defiance — when the first George Bush was president. This is the separation of storm and sanitary sewer lines, an expensive but necessary process brought to a crisis in many Midwestern cities by booming housing development through the ’80s and ’90s, all these new subdivisions flushing their toilets into inadequate, outdated systems that sent excrement into the rivers every time it rained. Let my husband offer an eyewitness report:

“We used to fish for carp off the bridge by my mom’s house and watch turds, rubbers and tampons float by.” This is when he was a boy. Damn President Obama for making us stop doing that!

Anyway, as this liberal-media report clearly indicates, the people of our nation’s heartland have turned against our president:

Karl Kissner, the restaurant’s owner, may represent a more vocal and influential attitude in Defiance. He calls himself a Democrat but says he did not vote for Mr. Obama, and his opposition to the administration has deepened.

A Democrat who didn’t vote Democratic in 2008? ‘Round these parts, we call those folks Republicans. But then, I don’t work for the New York Times.

Discuss. There’s a pretty good Metafilter thread about the same story, here.

Bloggage? Sure. Jim Griffioen at Sweet Juniper, along with his wife, have a knack for making the cutest Halloween costumes for their kids. But this one is extra-cute in situ: Ladies and gentlemen, Robocop.

And let’s leave it at that. I’ve reached the point of mega-saturation with politics at the moment, and would rather think of cute kids in Halloween costumes. Have a great day — I’m off to Wayne State.

“Last Call” has been on the nightstand, over there in the right rail, for a while now, but I’m still not done with it. It’s a time issue, not one of content; plus, I added “Freedom” to the mix, diluting my attention even further. But “Last Call” — a new history of Prohibition — is a great book, and I’m savoring it like two fingers of good scotch, a sip at a time.

Also, it’s dovetailing with the central plot lines of “Boardwalk Empire,” which takes place in 1920 Atlantic City, immediate after passage of the Volstead Act. It’s about the birth of American organized crime (or, at least, its vault into the big money) and a lot of other things, too, all of which were wrapped up with Prohibition, specifically the emergence of women as a political force to be reckoned with.

Women bore the brunt of their husbands’ drinking, sometimes quite literally cleaning up the mess it left behind, and became the driving force behind Prohibition. Many of the suffragettes came out of the temperance movement, and vice versa. A woman newly empowered in one area might look around for some other things to make right in her life, and so this week’s “Boardwalk Empire” episode introduced the once-taboo subject of birth control.

One of the dowagers of the local temperance movement hands a younger woman a pamphlet, which gets a significant-prop closeup: “Family Limitation” by Margaret Sanger. Once it’s opened it’s a chamber of horrors — Lysol douche, anyone? — but it was a necessary step along the way. Everyone fights with their biology to some extent. This was how women had to do it, once upon a time.

One of the obvious traits of the so-called pro-life movement that isn’t often discussed is the large percentage of its adherents who oppose all artificial birth control, as well as abortion. To them, it’s very simple: Don’t want children? Don’t have sex. The act is designed to bring babies into the world, and in order to do it in the way God intended, you always have to be open to the idea of increasing your tribe. Nice Catholic married couples can practice something called Natural Family Planning, which works on the same principle, and if you look around the web you can find many enthusiastic adherents talking about how hawt it makes their marital sex lives, how in-tune they are with their bodies, etc. It always puzzled me why it was OK to consciously avoid making babies by regulating your sex life but not OK to use a device or drug. Isn’t this imposing one’s own human will on the Lord’s business, as well? Yes and no. There’s a concept called “prayerful consideration” involved, and well — I check out at this point. Whatever these folks are selling, I’m not buying.

A friend of mine works in upstate New York, near Kiryas Joel, that odd Hasidic town where everyone is orthodox Jewish (and many of them are on public assistance, because if there’s one thing a small town can’t provide for that many people, it’s a living). Orthodox Jews also condemn birth control. My friend tells me the No. 1 most-asked-for service at the public-health clinics in the area is the tubal ligation done on the QT (i.e., without the knowledge of husbands and/or rabbis), perfect for that population, because their own religious practices take women out of the sexual rotation for about two weeks out of every month anyway, and laparoscopic procedures leave no trace and have short recovery times. The women come to the doctors trailing a brood of six or seven, exhausted, impoverished, with one goal uppermost: No more. In many ways they are the counterpart of the women of 1920 — oppressed by their biology but smart enough to know there’s a way it can be different. And that way is worth fighting for.

I have a feeling Margaret Schroeder, the woman at the center of “Boardwalk Empire,” is going to discover the limitations of Lysol as birth control. I salute her, and all her real-life sisters of the period, just the same. It was worth the fight.

So, some bloggage:

The Onion AV Club on “Family Limitation.”

George Soros calls for an end to the other kind of prohibition.

Hysterical clip of John McCain, with the applause line that keeps on giving, via the Daily Show.

Office hours. I must give guidance to the young! Have a great, windy day.

The weather forecast today, as indicated by the Yahoo weather app on my phone, is a series of horizontal lines. That indicates wind. Big wind. Wreck-of-the-Edmund-Fitzgerald windy. Four-to-six-foot-waves windy. Windy, I tell you. (I tried to embed some Gordon Lightfoot music for the occasion, but the stupid code didn’t work. I have better things to do than flyspeck HTML. Or PHP. Or whatever it is. Just hum along in your head: The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down, of the big lake they call Gitche-gumee…) I’m just grateful we’re not pulling the boat today. Here are the forces at work, if you like:

Me, I have another stuck-inside-all-day on tap, but I’m going to try to get outside for at least a while. Maybe get hit by some flying branches.

Which may be preferable to being a MoveOn.org supporter in Kentucky these days. Good lord, what is wrong with people? I already see a cultural divide between even the description of this event was — lefties are calling it a “stomping,” with right-wing blogs favoring “stepping.” I call it aggravated stepping, and that stupid geezer and his stupid friends ought to be charged; that is simply beyond the pale. Is this what it’s come to? Is this how the teabaggers take their country back?

By the way, there was more than one camera at that event, and one got clear images of one of the assailants. I expect he’ll skate, too — him and his “don’t tread on me” button, that is. Ha ha.

The more I watch that video, the more irritable I get, and I need to go pick up Alan at the Subaru shop. Let’s all take a happy pill and look at some snapshots from Basset’s housewarming, with some before shots thrown in to get a sense of the scope. I envy his first-floor laundry.

Back later.

Quite an evocative photograph in the Daily Telegraph this weekend. I love pictures like this, which flip the perspective from the usual view; there was one of Ryan White, the grade-school AIDS patient, back when he won the right to go to school — this skinny little boy facing a wall of photographers and reporters. How do you feel, Ryan? Great, thanks. I’ve never been 100 percent proud of my business. That was one of the bad days.

The news peg is, what? The president is seen interacting with an iPad, I guess. But the story is in those faces, especially of the two young women. I don’t know about you, but it would freak my cheese to see that sort of thing on a regular basis, which I imagine he does. That’s when you need a good consigliere, or a good wife, or someone who knows you as you and can tell you who you really are. Which doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not still going to start believing what you see. No wonder Bill Clinton stumbled.

So. I’m starting to wonder about the Washington Post op-ed operation. I’m wondering about all of them, actually, but this Charles Murray troll bait over the weekend got on my nerves. I guess it was supposed to be funny (although there’s not a wink or smidge of self-awareness anywhere in it), or maybe publishing it was just supposed to be buzzy — there are close to 800 comments on the thing, so hey, mission accomplished.

Toward the end of the piece, Murray lays out the failings of the fancypantsers in a series of paragraphs which I won’t make you read; fortunately Gawker has boiled it down to a list. A few key questions:

Do you have any idea who replaced Bob Barker on The Price Is Right?
Have you ever watched an Oprah show from beginning to end?
Have you ever read a “Left Behind” novel? Or a Harlequin romance?
Would you be caught dead in an RV or cruise ship?
Have you ever heard of Branson, Missouri?
Have you ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club?

My answers: No, no, hell no, sure why not, of course and yes. I once opened a Left Behind book in the library, to see what the fuss was about. I couldn’t get 12 pages into it, although I skimmed some of the rest, just to make sure it sucked all the way through. It did. So here’s a message from an elitist aimed at all you proles: Your taste in literature sucks. If you’re spending time in Branson when you could be in Vegas, you’re a fool. I have a secret wish to take a cruise vacation — at least if I could locate my deck chair far from the proletariat — but I could never persuade my husband to accompany me. (He’s an elitist with claustrophobia.)

Here’s Murray’s concluding paragraph. You tell me if he’s trying to be funny:

The bubble that encases the New Elite crosses ideological lines and includes far too many of the people who have influence, great or small, on the course of the nation. They are not defective in their patriotism or lacking a generous spirit toward their fellow citizens. They are merely isolated and ignorant. The members of the New Elite may love America, but, increasingly, they are not of it.

The isolated pot calls the ignorant kettle black? That’s rich, pals.

How was your weekend? Mine felt…productive, I guess. Got my exercise, restocked the pantry, did the laundry, neatened this and tidied that. Watched some catchup on “Boardwalk Empire,” which I am loving. A few weeks back, on one of the elitist NPR shows I love to listen to, “Sound Opinions” I b’lieve, the show’s music director was a guest. He talked about finding songs of the period (1920s) and re-recording them with contemporary artists. Last week’s episode closed with Loudon Wainwright III singing “Carrickfergus,” the old Irish ballad which is probably not of the 1920s, but dovetailed perfectly with the episode’s subject matter — the first St. Patrick’s Day in Atlantic City post-Volstead Act. It was so sad and beautiful I’ve been humming it ever since, because if there’s anything an elitist like me enjoys, it’s having a song in my head that’s not by Toby Keith.

OK, I’ll stop now.

BLoggage? Oh, surely you’ve seen Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things by now, but just in case you haven’t… Very funny.

And that’s it. Must commence Monday madness. I hope your own is tolerable.

It seems a week doesn’t go by without the New York Times doing a story on Detroit. I don’t think it’s ever been something I didn’t know about already, but that’s the Times’ job — to be the gatekeeper and curator of Our Vast Interesting Nation for its readers. To the extent that they’re trying to dispel the image of Detroit in the right-wing media, i.e., Detroit is a place where women have sex with pit bulls in dank drug houses (thanks, Weekly Standard!), I approve.

Anyway, everyone who lives here and pays even minimal attention knows the Slows Barbecue story. I see the piece also dug up that obscure, underexposed source, Toby Barlow. But it’s nice to see Supino’s Pizza getting some love — I like to stop here on Saturdays from time to time, but since I’m almost always alone, I have yet to try their signature pie, the Bismarck, which features an egg cracked over the top just before it goes into the oven. They don’t sell that one by the slice. One of these days.

Next stop for the NYT will doubtless be Saturday’s Halloween party at Theater Bizarre; fingers crossed they overcome the downside of success before that. Which is? What else?

Organizers say the city is demanding they get a temporary liquor license to give away beer to patrons — and fear inspectors will issue more requirements in days leading to Saturday’s affair.

Alan and I went to one of their summer events a couple years ago, and I was delighted to see Detroit police officers mingling through the crowd, which was peaceful and fun-loving. This Saturday-night party is truly one of a kind, and it would be a tragedy to see it shut down over this. (Hear that, Republican readers? I am coming out against regulation.) Watch the video at that link. That gives you a good sense of the place.

What else is going on this weekend? Elsewhere in the same story:

On Tuesday, the City Council denied a permit for a Highland Park company that has operated a “haunted bus tour” for a month through East Robinwood near Woodward. Organizers from Creative Images and Things acknowledged the desolate, burned-out street made a perfect stage for the 15-minute tours that include fake zombie attacks. But council members worried about a lack of streetlights — and the city’s image.

“I just think it sends the wrong message at this time,” council President Charles Pugh said.

For the record, I disapprove; most of the houses on this street are abandoned, but not all of them, and the poor souls who are stuck here deserve better than to have a bunch of suburban d-bags rolling through in buses, not to mention the fake zombies. (This is the street, by the way; Jim at Sweet Juniper put together a panorama that gives you an idea.) However, Charles Pugh’s silly comment almost makes me want to take the opposite view.

This has been a long, exhausting week. I know I say that every week, but this week is super-duper long and extra-schmextra exhausting. Productive, though — that always mitigates things. But I’m ready for the weekend. Let’s see what sort of bloggage we can dig up:

Scott Lemieux on Juan Williams. Key passage:

For the role of being a Washington Generals Potemkin “liberal” on Fox News, his former NPR affiliation, lazy sub-mediocrity and uncritical immersion in shallow center-right conventional wisdom are major assets.

Exactly right, and this is why, while I disapprove of the current practice of booting pundits for not being perfect, I can’t get upset about this one. Williams never dispensed a single comment, anywhere, that I found insightful or even interesting. Booting Dave Weigel from the WashPost was a loss. This? Not so much.

CDC finds regional disparities in teen-pregnancy rate. Bottom line:

Whatever the reason, the regional disparities are stark. In Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, for instance, 2008 birth rates were less than 25 per 1,000 teens aged 15 to 19, CDC found. In the same year, Arkansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas all had rates topping 60 per 1,000 teens.

Mississippi had the country’s highest rate (65.7), CDC says, while New Hampshire had the lowest (19.8).

Leslie Kantor, national education director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the report “makes it crystal clear that the teen birthrate is lower in states that provide students with comprehensive, evidence-based sex education.”

I think there’s more to it than that, but it’s interesting just the same.

Clarence Thomas’ old girlfriend says he loved the porno. Shocked, shocked, etc.

The weekend awaits, eventually. Hope yours is great.