With all due respect to David Simon, I’m still paying attention to the Petraeus story. It’s not about where the general stashed his bayonet any more, if it ever was — it’s about total, jaw-dropping, WTFuckery like this:

In February 2010, a gossip column in The Tampa Bay Times reported that Mr. Petraeus and his wife arrived escorted by 28 police officers on motorcycles to a pirate-themed party at the Kelleys’ home, to mark Tampa’s Gasparilla Pirate Fest, an annual event.

And this:

In the phone call to authorities, Jill Kelley, a party hostess and unofficial social liaison for leaders of the U.S. military’s Central Command in Tampa, cited her status as an honorary consul general while complaining about news vans that had descended on her two-story brick home overlooking Tampa Bay.

“You know, I don’t know if by any chance, because I’m an honorary consul general, so I have inviolability, so they should not be able to cross my property. I don’t know if you want to get diplomatic protection involved as well,” she told the 911 dispatcher Monday.

And this, this and this:

I can’t get over that head-tilt thing. Spy magazine once published a montage of photos of Ivana Trump, who, whenever a camera was aimed at her, would push her knees together and swivel one calf out to the side. Of course you want to show off your good side, but please.

Throw in the shady charity, and you realize this whole thing could have been touched off by a parking ticket. It was just waiting to fall.

Any links today? Why…no, I don’t think so. Just the usual phoned-in crap. Have a nice day.

I’m not normally in town on Mondays, but I was this week, which happened to intersect with THE DARKEST SHAME OF MY LIFE, the every-other-week visit from my cleaning woman. Neither one of us wants me here while she’s working, and somehow I ended up at the newly opened McDonald’s in my neighborhood. They promised, when it was on the drawing board, that they wanted it to become a Starbucky gathering place, with free wifi, so I figured I’d take them up on it.

How many here have ever put on the paper hat of McDonald’s? I know, it’s a visor now, but it was a paper hat when most of us here were likely to work there. Working at Mickey D’s is the classic American first job, and I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve known who earned their first paychecks dishing up fries. I’m now mellow enough that I don’t mind little mistakes in my orders, figuring they’re payback on the millions of mistakes I’ve made in my own work.

This McDonald’s is in Detroit, and of course Detroit is an African-American city, so most of the kids working there are, as well. Also, Grosse Pointe kids get their first jobs clerking for Supreme Court justices or caddying for General Motors board members. Today, this crew is being overseen by a middle-aged woman, black, a clone of every other manager or assistant manager in every other McDonald’s in this part of the world.

When my friend Deb’s son was getting his training at his local McD’s, one of these women came into the room where they were learning the closing procedure and food-handling procedure and all the rest of it. It’s a lot for a 16-year-old to take in. She was carrying a tray filled with french fries. “MAC-Donald’s kicking y’all’s butts yet? How about something to eat.”

The woman Monday afternoon was shepherding her young workers with that mix of absolute authority and indulgent maternal instinct so necessary in this particular environment. One blocked an aisle I was trying to walk through, and she barked, “Make ROOM for this lady — she’s a customer!” before turning back to the kid she was sitting down with.

“Do you know your schedule?” she asked him.

“Um, yeah,” the kid said. Pause. “I think.”

“Tell it to me,” she ordered.

“Saturday, 3-9,” he tried.

“And Sunday?”

“The same?”

“That’s right, honey. You’re doing good.”

It cannot be easy to run one of these places. You’re always hiring, always training, always ready to step in when one of your teenage workers decides not to show up on Saturday, having not yet learned the courtesy of two weeks’ notice. The owner of Zingerman’s once described dishwashing positions as something that change on almost an hourly basis, and any restaurant owner too good to handle that duty isn’t long for the business. You don’t have that problem at McDonald’s, but you better not be too proud to make coffee and shake salt over the fries.

I passed the time writing a letter of recommendation for one of my former students, now trying to get into Berkeley’s documentary program. The advantage of dealing with digital files is, the selection committee won’t be able to see grease smears on the paper.

The kid who took my order was obviously a greenhorn, but like I said: No biggie. The time to worry is when people who are plainly overqualified for the work start turning up behind the counter. During the absolute worst of the recession, I had my bags at Trader Joe’s packed by a guy who took enormous care to use every inch of space wisely. I walked out with two perfectly balanced bags and thought God, I hope this man didn’t go to engineering school.

So. How was your Monday? I see the Petraeus story is getting weirder (and more understandable) by the day, now that we know it features that fixture of Washington scandal — a man sending around shirtless photos of himself:

A federal agent who launched the investigation that ultimately led to the resignation of Central Intelligence Agency chief David Petraeus was barred from taking part in the case over the summer due to superiors’ concerns that he had become personally involved in the case, according to officials familiar with the probe.

New details about how the Federal Bureau of Investigation handled the case suggest that even as the bureau delved into Mr. Petraeus’s personal life, the agency had to address questionable conduct by one of its own—including allegedly sending shirtless photos of himself to a woman involved in the case.

May I just offer this word of advice to the men of the world — from Detroit judges to U.S. Congressmen — who feel compelled to send seminude photos of yourself to women you want to bag? Don’t. It doesn’t work. Women appreciate a nice-looking man, sure, but our brains don’t really work like that. Yours do, but not ours. Send a funny note instead, or an iTunes mix, or whatever. She’ll thank you, and you’ll be less likely to end up famous for the wrong reason.

On a more serious note, a Q&A with an expert on education policy worldwide. We’re doing it wrong:

When we think about market mechanisms in education, we think about managing consumer demand. It’s all about school choice.

And then you look at Shanghai, which also believes in market mechanisms, but has a totally different strategy. They operate on the supply side. What Shanghai has done is create incentives to attract the most talented teachers into the most challenging classrooms. And to get the best principals into the toughest schools. It’s the same kind of philosophy, based on market mechanisms. But they turned the problem on its head and achieved a remarkable improvement in educational outcomes.

Having dispensed with Monday — during which Sunday’s 70-degree temperatures fell 35 degrees — Tuesday is looking far better. Let’s hope so.

I don’t hang out in Grand Haven on a Sunday afternoon in November just for grins. Kate is preparing for an adventure — three weeks in Europe next summer with the international program at her summer camp. Not a bad deal, touring the Continent, playing jazz, staying with the locals. For us, it means a number of weekends between then and now being her Sherpas for the required rehearsals. After we dump the amp and the instrument — and the musician — we are at liberty. And on a lovely, warm day.

So we went to the water:

And then we went to the woods:

This was all within the same state park. Pure Michigan. About a minute after I took that last picture, two sizable does bounded across the path in front of us, having a little frolic before gun season opens Thursday.

And then we had lunch at a nice little diner in Grand Haven, which had that empty look tourist towns get in the off-season. We went into one store and the owner nearly tackled us, introducing us personally to every item of inventory. We escaped with one jar of blueberry jam. Eight bucks. So who won that one? I’d say the guy who got $8.

The walk in the woods was calming. I’m trying to stop slicing off piece after piece of schadenfreude pie, but man, is it good, and every time I see Karl Rove’s face, I must read whatever type surrounds it. But I think I’m done now. (Please, I’m so full. No more pie.) But please, don’t offer my any more. I’m not safe around that stuff.

Instead, how about a good old people-suck story about hazing? It’ll strip your good feelings about your fellow man, I guarantee.

What news I did read this weekend was about Cloak and Shag-Her, to use the NYPost’s outstanding headline on day one of the Petraeus story. When Alan told me this woman was push-up girl, much became clear. Someone tell me: At what age do men stop chasing poontang over a cliff?

Have a good week, all.

I have a long post I’ve been throwing links into a pile for, but I keep getting beaten to the punch by people who are smarter and actually do this for a living. Both Dick Morris and Haley Barbour came out in the last two days with their own personal theories of how the president won re-election, and boy, is he a lucky guy:

Haley Barbour, who served as Mississippi governor when Hurricane Katrina hit his state, asserted Thursday that “Hurricane Sandy saved Barack Obama’s presidency.”

“It broke the momentum that Romney had coming in to the end of October,” the former chairman of the Republican National Committee told TODAY’s Matt Lauer.

He at least gives a nod to the country’s changing demography, before course-correcting:

But the more proximate cause of my error was that I did not take full account of the impact of hurricane Sandy and of Governor Chris Christie’s bipartisan march through New Jersey arm in arm with President Obama. Not to mention Christe’s fawning promotion of Obama’s presidential leadership.

It made all the difference.

Neither has a shred of data to support these contentions. This is just one of those Things They Know By Virtue of Being Lavishly Paid Sages.

The biggest lesson of this week has been: Don’t trust guys like this. I have a feeling there will be a lot of contracts quietly expiring once the spotlights dim. The new negotiation will be, “Dick, can you do math? No? Good luck with the rest of your career.”

There’s a sub-theme here, too — that demography is the new decider. And while it has a lot of truth to it, it’s subtler than a few glib talking points. I think, of all people, John Cook at Gawker sort of nails it here:

One of the reasons the right-wing “brown people won” argument is so irksome is the implication that nonwhite votes don’t really count in the way white ones do. That white people vote based on logic and argumentation, and are persuadable, but nonwhites just press the “D” button and wait for their Obamaphones. That appealing to white votes and nonwhite votes are fundamentally different things. We would have won—we had more votes, but they had the blacks. What are you gonna do?

This is vile. All votes are the same. Persuading an African-American to vote for increasing taxes on the wealthy is precisely the same as persuading a white voter. Every Latino who cares about the treatment of illegal immigrants in this country and so voted for Obama did so for the same reason I did. There’s no difference between us. But the giddiness among the left over the racial coalition Obama built sometimes strikes me as uncomfortably close to eliding that fundamental equality, and regarding nonwhite votes as gimmes that don’t require persuasion. And it subtly ghettoizes those nonwhite voters, splintering issues of national importance into slivers of self-interest. Obama didn’t win because Latino voters want immigration reform. He won because more Americans want immigration reform than don’t.

Matt Yglesias plays variations on the theme:

Pundits are quickly turning to immigration to explain the Republicans’ Latino problem and to offer a possible cure, but the reality is that the rot cuts much deeper. The GOP doesn’t have a problem with Latino voters per se. Rather, it has a problem with a broad spectrum of voters who simply don’t feel that it’s speaking to their economic concerns. The GOP has an economic agenda tilted strongly to the benefit of elites, and it has preserved support for that agenda—even though it disserves the majority of GOP voters—with implicit racial politics.

He goes on to discuss Sonia Sotomayor, who some National Review wag suggested should pronounce her name “Soda-meyer” like an American, dammit.

Well. It’s the end of the week. Let us all let the weekend cleanse away its grime, bank its passionate fires, and ease us into Middle Fall and the inevitable run-up to the holidays. Let me leave you with a link you house-freaks should like — the rescue of a great Detroit house, lavishly illustrated with photos.

See you all Monday.

I remember working early the morning after George W. Bush was re-elected. I was on the copy-desk rim, as they say, and the editor-in-chief was consulting with the design editor over the front-page design. Once upon a time on mornings like this, editors looked over their underlings’ shoulders as the finishing touches were being done on the main story. But by 2004, it was all about design, er, “presentation.”

The presentation that day featured a giant, enormous, sea-to-shining-sea headline that said, simply, W. Only huge:

W.

But a lot bigger. It looked like a propaganda poster, which is sort of what it was.

That was a fairly shitty period in my life — back in Indiana after my magical year in Ann Arbor, working a job I didn’t want, thanks to the very woman who was standing next to my desk cooing over this stupid headline. George W. Bush had been returned to office, even though the war he started was going about as badly as these things can go, having done so in part by painting an actual Vietnam veteran as some sort of hybrid coward/rich punk, which is sort of hilariously ironic when you think about it.

I recall reading the page proofs that morning with a grim, sour cloud hanging over my head. But even though Twitter didn’t exist then, and Facebook was only a kooky toy for those with a harvard.edu email address, I can’t imagine going online and posting some of the histrionics I’ve been reading today.

Please, don’t make me go looking for links. I’ve been dipping in and out all day — Facebook, Twitter, blogs, comments here and there. The country has been delivered into the hands of the Muslim enemy, and the end of freedom is nigh and I hope you all enjoy your free stuff, freeloaders. And so on. I had a few chats through the course of the day that sum up how I feel today, but you probably heard the gist if you paid any attention to the news today.

We’ll see.

I was in Lansing all day working on Bridge’s day-after package, and I am — I know I say this every day lately — a bit wrung out. I’ll be popping in and out with some of the things that came up over the course of this crazy last few weeks for a while, I think. For now, let me share some of the very fine links I saw today, on this day o’ many links.

I think this was the best of the bunch, about how the right-wing echo chamber collapsed in upon itself and created its own reality, which wasn’t, um, reality:

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because Romney supporters like Jennifer Rubin and Hugh Hewitt saw it as their duty to spin constantly for their favored candidate rather than being frank about his strengths and weaknesses. What conservative Washington Post readers got, when they traded in Dave Weigel for Rubin, was a lot more hackery and a lot less informed about the presidential election.

Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. WorldNetDaily brought you birtherism. Forbes brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. National Review obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, misrepresenting an Obama quote in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka the Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemies in a “Grand Jihad” against America. Seriously?

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because their information elites pandered in the most cynical, self-defeating ways, treating would-be candidates like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain as if they were plausible presidents rather than national jokes who’d lose worse than George McGovern.

More on the same theme, from Andrew Sullivan, not one of my faves, but he makes some good points here, but note where he pulls out the out-of-context quoting of an Obama statement.

Can we get a little crazy up in here? OK, here’s David Gelernter. Two paragraphs, and he manages to demand we REPLACE OUR SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES NOW. Doesn’t he work for Yale?

Gerrymandering made visible. I live in one of these districts now. It doesn’t make me happy.

The poisonous right wing:

But even a clumsy candidate might have beaten Obama if not for a simple factor that could not be overcome: the GOP’s growing extremism. The Republican strategy of making the election a referendum on the president’s handling of the economy was perfectly sound. The problem was that the Republican Party couldn’t pass the credibility test itself. For many voters disenchanted with Obama, it still was not safe to vote for his opponent.

Yeah.

More tomorrow, when I’ve had seven whole hours of sleep. Until then, enjoy drunk Diane Sawyer.

On Election Day, I woke up at my current ridiculous hour — 5 a.m. After I read the entire Internet and a chapter from Friday’s book-club selection (“The Leisure Seeker,” Michael Zadoorian) I laid in a puddle of self-loathing, watching a debate between my angel and devil. By now it was 6:45.

Hey, fatty. You should be exercising. This book isn’t that good.

But my knee hurts.

Your knee hurts because you don’t exercise. It’s a loop.

And then, just to make sure the angel and devil would be joined by a third visual cliché, a light bulb appeared over my head. (How did cartoonists illustrate “I just had an idea” before Thomas Edison? Candles?) I know: I will get up and walk briskly to my polling place! It’s not exactly an eight-mile run, but my knee hurts. It’s something. Better than nothing.

And so I got up and pulled on a few layers and headed out, looking frankly a little rumply and just-out-of-beddy. As I drew closer to city hall I reflected on the genius of this plan, as I’d be able to enter via a different door and bypass the sign-wavers in the parking lot, at least some of whom I’d know. Then I saw the parking lot. It was full. Those people couldn’t possibly all be waiting to vote, could they?

They could. And were. Even with more machines than I’ve ever seen, it was almost a 30-minute wait to vote. I filled out my ballot with grim purpose and started home, striving for a sweet spot for the footfall to not make every step say ouch. I detoured through the alley because of construction on a storefront, and saw what appeared at a distance to be a fried-chicken thigh lying near a dumpster. (I was behind the Chicken Shack.) As I grew closer, it revealed itself: A wallet.

A wallet with a credit card, and an EBT card, and a little bit of cash, and a driver’s license. I went around to the construction crew: Anybody here named Aaron? No. So I walked back to city hall and turned it in to the police. Regular readers who haven’t been bored into stupefaction may recall I lost my own wallet a few years ago, and it was delivered back to my door, intact, by a kind soul. This was not just a lost wallet, but a chance to repay a karmic debt.

I also found the guy on Facebook, and messaged him. Did what I can. When a guy’s getting food stamps, he can’t afford to lose his wallet.

I’m writing this while watching election returns come in, but it’s early. I have to be up at oh-dark-nothing to get to Lansing for the post-election stuff, and it’s likely I’ll be asleep by the time this thing is called, so this may have to be an open-thread day. Just in case there are a few of you who would like to discuss anything else, some conversation-starters:

A starving-dog story with a twist, involving the Detroit Bus Company, which I wrote about for Bridge a few weeks ago.

A few months ago, something took me into the vortex of Timothy Ferriss, author of the “four-hour” bullshit franchise. Want to get rich and not work too hard? Buy “The Four-Hour Work Week.” Did you know you can be fit and strong and have a six-pack? No? Why, you must not have read “The Four-Hour Body.” I hear that in the latter volume, Ferriss claims he can give a woman a 15-minute orgasm. Your initial reaction may be mine: Who the hell wants one of those? (I’m kind of with Woody Allen on the orgasm question — mine have all been right on the money.) Without having read the books, I feel I can safely say he’s full of shit, not just for the 15-minute orgasm claim, but also because it’s said that this man weighs his own feces for some health-related reason. So when I heard his latest book, some other four-hour thing, is not having a very easy time of it, all I could think was, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Finally, remember 2 Live Crew? “Me So Horny,” Tipper Gore, all that stuff? He’s settled down, as we all tend to do with age. What’s he doing now? Coaching high-school football. Interesting guy. Good story.

Now to schedule this post and wait for the news to roll in. Fingers crossed for all my votes, and yours, too.

UPDATE: OK, I’m still up. Mourdock just ate dirt in Indiana. I may need to survive on coffee tomorrow.

I have the bestest readers in the world. One of you guys — someone I’ve known since junior high school, who sometimes comments here as MarcG — read yesterday’s blog and got into his photo albums. Turns out Marc was one of the revelers up north a time or two. That balcony at the yacht club? He sent a picture:

And just so’s you can why all the girls thought Marc was just the cutest thing, even when he was a little overserved, here’s Himself:

Now he lives in Latvia. Take note, eastern European girls. And thanks for scanning your photos, Marc, so I didn’t have to.

Today was, shall we say, not a top-tenner. Out the driveway bright and early, arrived in Lansing at 8 a.m., only to discover the internet was out. You don’t know how much you use the internet until it’s not around anymore. Derek went off to work at home, and Ron and I sat around reading “limp iPads,” as they call those paper things with news printed on them, until it became clear the ‘net wasn’t coming back anytime soon. So we both went home, only I had to drive 100 miles back in the other direction. I was back in my kitchen by noon, and celebrated having evaded the I-96 sniper twice in one day by having a cup of leftover chili and putting my feet up to read the news. Ninety minutes later, I woke up. That hardly ever happens, but when it does, it’s unnerving. My last conscious thought was how good a nice hot cup of chili feels in your tummy on a chilly day. I think the sniper was the least dangerous thing on my commute today.

After that, I sent 400 emails, give or take. If you got one, rest assured I gave it my full attention.

So, today? It’s the big day. Let’s make this a what-happened-at-your-polling-place thread. (Of course, pipe up if Llewd’s scrotum turns up.) I hit my absolute limit yesterday, and after one cycle through the NPR headlines, opted for “Birth of the Cool” on the drive. Played it twice. Great album.

This seemed to be the alternative.

I was up to my nostrils in the Truth Squad today, but enough noise came through the static to bring me the mini-story — micro-story — of Nate Silver.

I’m a big fan of Silver, not because he’s a lefty, but because he has a pretty spectacular track record. A short one, yes, but pretty impressive. He doesn’t get excited by much other than data. So of course some people hate him.

This Deadspin thing sums it up pretty well. As does this New Republic thing. (Link fixed.) Apparently there’s some pushback to Silver’s consistent projection — for months now — that Barack Obama has a 79 percent chance of being re-elected. It’s gone up and down a few points, but the race has never been nearly as close as the horserace narrative would have you believe. At least in the electoral college. The popular vote will be close, but close enough for hand grenades, anyway.

What his model comes down to are probabilities:

That probabilities do not ensure outcomes—something every blackjack player who has busted while hitting against a face card has long known—has escaped Silver’s detractors. Brendan Nyhan at CJR and Ben Jacobs at Daily Download have emptied an ample volume of bullets into this barrel of fish. Ezra Klein put it succinctly: “If Mitt Romney wins on election day, it doesn’t mean Silver’s model was wrong. After all, the model has been fluctuating between giving Romney a 25 percent and 40 percent chance of winning the election. That’s a pretty good chance!”

But Silver and his defenders have run aground on the same problem sports statisticians used to face: the failure of laymen to grasp the difference between predictions and probabilities. “The criticism of Nate is that he’s predicting something, when he’s trying to explain that’s not what he’s doing at all,” said Dave Cameron, a baseball statistician at FanGraphs who briefly worked with Silver at BP. “He’s putting the odds on something.” Cameron added, “It is kind of like what we do in baseball. We recognize there are multiple outcomes. A utility infielder can hit a home run off [reigning Cy Young winner Justin] Verlander. It’s just not probable.”

Romney could still win. But — Silver’s model says — it’s just not as likely.

Now, a waltz through the bloggage:

Sixteen storm tales from Sandy

A kale salad recipe. Because kale is the new spinach, right?

And I should have one more, but honestly — I’m so out of gas they need another word for it. Have a great weekend, all.

Happy Halloween. Here’s a new wrinkle in election-related mailers:

All those people are our neighbors. Why would the Americans for Limited Government (a Koch-supported group, incidentally) be interested in telling us whether they voted in the last two presidential-election cycles? Beats me. I asked someone who has forgotten more about politics than I’ll ever know, and he said it’s a new thing — shaming, basically, as a get-out-the-vote tactic. Research shows that you can goad some people to the polls if they feel their neighbors are getting a similar report about them.

I suspect this tactic works best in white suburbia.

Of course we both voted in 2004, but not at this address.

I’m still sort of agog at the damage left behind by one faltering hurricane. I keep reading that the cleanup could take “days.” I look at photos of flooded subway tunnels and think, “try ‘weeks.'” One of you engineers — heh — needs to enlighten the group: What’s the effect of seawater on railroad electrical systems? It can’t be good.

Anyone have both a) power; and b) a good storm story to tell? I talked to someone today who spent the storm in a Washington D.C. high rise, and said the wind was terrifying. I don’t doubt it.

But life goes on. And it demands bloggage:

An elegant essay on the Minnesota marriage vote, calling on that northern-plains archetype, the Norwegian bachelor farmer:

My late uncle bachelor farmer had a bachelor farmer pal, whom I’ll call Bob. My uncle and Bob were the best of friends for more than 50 years. Every winter, when no work could be done on their farms, the two took long road trips and saw America. When they got too old to farm, they traveled more. When they got too old to travel and live alone on their farms, they acquired adjacent rooms at the nursing home in town. They died within months of each other at that home.

If you read only one election story this week, let it be Jane Mayer’s piece on how voter fraud, so rare as to be…well, very rare, found its way onto the national radar screen.

Finally, what sort of person sits inside during a weather emergency spewing misinformation into the ether? This guy.

Wednesday already? If you say so.

Well, hello, Sandy.

Monday was a difficult day all around — an over two-hour drive home (90 minutes in ideal conditions) thanks to a freeway wreck, but I was lucky, because I missed the snare on the morning commute, when a scare over the I-96 shooter shut down the road entirely. And then the misery started, with the howling wind, the rain and a DVD player that at first balked at season one of “Homeland,” the one bright spot to the day.

We got it worked out, but to say I slept fitfully was an understatement. So a few links, and let’s start mainlining coffee.

I hope those of you who were closer to the storm — we were about 650 miles from the eye, mind you — are safe and sound today. During my long bout of insomnia last night I kept refreshing the NYT and Twitter, blanching at the awfulness, waiting for one of the three oaks within crushing distance of my house to give up the ghost.

Storms, snipers, malfunctioning digital technology. Hello, America. Stand by for news!

This has been one of the strangest races of the season, one where you’d think you’d have more of, well, a race. Instead, Pete Hoekstra is phoning it in and counting down the days until Debbie Stabenow hands him his hat and sends him back to Washington not as a senator, but more likely a lobbyist:

After initially balking at running against Stabenow, Hoekstra jumped into the race and immediately stirred controversy with a Super Bowl ad that accused Stabenow of excessive government spending. The ad, which some saw as racially insensitive, featured a Chinese-American actress speaking in broken English. It seemed to cost him some support.

Since then, the campaign has been largely quiet, rarely making headlines. No debates. And rare public appearances except in television ads.

While trailing in the polls, Hoekstra spent the last weekend of September in Israel to study the upheaval in the Middle East rather than campaign.

I remember when the Labor Department tried to tighten up regulations to protect children working on farms, and the pushback suggested they’d just told an army of apple-cheeked Amish children that they could no longer gather eggs in the henhouse. Nope, it was more about keeping them from being crushed to death in silos. Too bad they let themselves be pushed back.

A story we’ve all heard too much of, but here’s a little more: How small media kept the Lance Armstrong story alive when the big guns were all wearing yellow bracelets. And prevailed. (Note: Link fixed.)

The WSJ and NYT have their paywalls down during the storm. Take advantage by reading this non-storm story, about? The difficulty of making red and blue find a little purple:

In past election years, about a quarter of her clients wouldn’t date a member of the opposite party. Now it is three-quarters, (a matchmaker) says.

Finally, before I go, of course it was too bad about the Tigers. But let me ask the question being asked all over Detroit today: If we had won that series, and spent the night running through the streets, setting fires and what-have-you, we all know what the headlines would say. So why, in San Francisco, do these folks get to be “high-spirited fans?” Just wondering.