Monday Clips

Monday Clips

I was quite happilly out of the loop and out of state all weekend (with good reason). Here's some of what I missed:

Potential challengers emerge in two congressional races. Iowa Republican rolls out Dubuque businessman and conservative columnist Rod Blum to challenge Bruce Braley. Someone from Braley's staff is probably even now perusing eight years of columns for gems. That's the risk us writers take.

On the other end of the state, Mike Denklau moves back to the state to challenge Steve King.

Digby has an interesting post on independent voters:

The knee jerk assumption that they are always more moderate than everyone else is probably wrong. They might just be more cranky, more cynical, more uninformed, more skeptical or more impatient.

In fact, I suspect that a large number of them are apolitical people who don't really understand politics at all and simply reject whoever is in power when things aren't going well, without regard to party.

An interesting FiveThirtyEight post on Democratic Party nomination reform that I hope to dig more deeply into later.

Q: everything else in computing is getting faster, smaller, more-er; why not CD drive speed? It's still stuck at 52x. A: Because getting faster woul literally rip the CDs apart.