Mid-week clips

Middle of the day, middle of the week

My Register post from yesterday asks a question I'm asking a lot lately: What's a party?

Numbers geeks and doomsayers alike will love Swing State Project's look at 1994:

while the Democrats may lose seats, there won't be a 1994-level wipeout. There aren't as many retirements as in 1994 (where the Dems had 28 open seats), and certainly not as many retirements in unpleasantly red seats (17 of those 1994 retirements were in GOP-leaning seats according to the Cook Political Report's Partisan Voting Index - compared with only 8 facing us in 2010). There are still lots of polls, of the non-Rasmussen variety, giving the Dems an edge in the generic ballot. The DCCC has a sizable financial advantage, and maybe most importantly, the DCCC and its individual members appear acutely aware of the potential danger, unlike in '94, when they seemed to blithely sail into disaster.

First of a multi-parter so stay tuned.

Poetic justice: Woman Sues Debt Collector, Wins $8.1 Million. I knew a guy once who called bill collectors "scumbags," which was funny because that was his job.

You're heard of Creole and Pidgin English, except now they're calling it "Globish."