Thursday digest

- I'm going to a wedding on Sunday that is being held outdoors. When I woke up yesterday, the chance of precipitation for that day was 60%. By mid-afternoon, it had been downgraded to 40%, and as of last night, it was at 0%, where it has held ever since. Now explain to me why meteorologists can be way off about rain four days out and no one bats an eyelash, but if you dare question Al Gore's ability to see into the crystal ball hundreds of years down the road you're shouted down.

- Here's some good stuff from our friends at the Daily Kos. You know, life is just so damn unfair. Some excerpts, with my comments added:

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The most important people in Democratic politics don't even know it.

It's the overweight mom I see in my neighborhood. The one with two young children who has pre-diabetes and doesn't know it yet. She lives in a society that won't give her preventative care or nutritional education, but which underwrites big corporations that sell her super-sized food that is silently eating away at her body.

(Because it's the taxpayer's job to teach her how to eat properly and pay for it when she doesn't.)

It's the small town single mom sitting at the kitchen table late at night smoking a cigarette...taxed to the last dollar like all the working poor...trying to figure out how to pay the electric bill and still have rent money on a cleaning woman's wages.

(Because asking her to reconsider spending scarce dollars on her pack-a-day habit would be cruel.)

It's that hopeful nurse in a rural hospital who spends her day cradling low birth-weight babies in a society that stopped caring about some of its children with the rise of the political party that's "abstinence-only."

(Because a government which encourages the termination of inconvenient pregnancies instead would foster a society that is "caring about some of its children".)

It's that girl I saw on the subway who looked at me with that curious stare. She doesn't even know about global warming.

(Lucky her.)

None of these people care about Democratic politics. None of these people care about YearlyKos or Bill O'Reilly.

But if you can fully understand what they are going through, the policy implications, the political task-at-hand, what steps we need to take in our system of government, the laws we need to pass...if you can put yourself in their shoes...then you can also understand what I mean when I say tonight: the most important person in Democratic politics is you.

(Because if we only try hard enough, we can protect people from the consequences of repeatedly making bad choices in life promote social justice!)

***

- Here's a business idea for the budding entrepreneurs out there.

- I am so not into Facebook.

- Any guesses as to the over/under on how long the blame for Minneapolis is laid at the White House doorstep by the liberal media? Hell, it's been over 24 hours since the tragedy so there must be some way someone has found a way to pin this on Bush and Cheney. I am going out on a limb here and saying that at least one Dem nominee will publicly insinuate just that at Yearly Kos in Chicago this weekend. In fact, a quick check of the Huffington Post's comments section is entirely predictable, with some going so far as to suggest that Rove engineered the collapse to deflect attention away from Alberto Gonzalez and other Republican problems.

You know, the term "Bush Derangement Syndrome" is just a little too mild sometimes. How about just good ol' "frothing at the mouth" instead?

- Larry O'Brien is a desperate man.