I wanted to believe Lance Armstrong, even after he wrote, "Enough is enough."

I thought it was strange that he declined to contest the allegations of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, but I couldn't help empathizing with this man, so confident and earnest, a sports legend and a survivor. [Read more]

At the easternmost edge of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where I live, the land is low.  In the deep south it would be called the low country.  Here it's called the cedar swamp.  Where there isn't swamp there is rock, where thin sheaths of earth allow only the shallow-rooted trees to thrive--the quaking aspen, white birch and the Michigan cottonwood known as Balm-of-Gilead.  The weed trees.
  [Read more]

Do you really wish a left wing commie symp to run this thing?

Ha!

We are looking at some old Norse Myth where the great King of old age must debate the youngster; the youngster attacking some Viagra prone leader with his life force! For chissakes!

Okay....

Let us see how this goes!

I vote for one of my heroes over the last 40 years against a corporate front; against a young prick who simply wishes to make the rich richer, the poor poorer and then wishes that the middle class fall in line and obey their corporate owners!

Let's go!

I am rootin for Biden and Truth & Justice & the American Way. [Read more]

My friends, the 2012 election is about choices. It is the choice between the out-of-control socialism of Barack Obama and the steady professional leadership of Mitt Romney. Also, the Navy SEAL who actually shot Osama bin Laden lives at 112 Ark St. in St. Louis, Mo. [Read more]

The Supreme Court may forbid any use of race in college admissions in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas, being heard today, because the conservative wing really wants to overturn previous rulings and because Justice Kagan has recused herself. If that happens, the winning plaintiff will be a classic poster child for anti-affirmative-action litigation: a white kid who got 1180 on her SATs.
 [Read more]

I used to be proud to invite people to contribute to dagblog. Whenever I met a writer, I would encourage them to share their work here. We're not the biggest blog in the sphere, but I would boast about the intelligence and civility of our discussions.

We still have plenty of those these days. I think that the interpersonal rancor has even declined. But the hostility and disrespect towards outsiders has grown. I do not feel comfortable inviting writers to contribute here anymore. [Read more]

"President Obama likes to be alone," is the lede of Maureen Dowd's column today.  What follows is a completely plausible sounding, totally BS 800 words that I just can't help but excise and comment on, bit by bit. [Read more]

If Paul Ryan can't handle a reporter's questions on guns and taxes, how can he possibly be qualified to sit in the POTUS chair should anything befall Romney?

Please, watch this video of a local Flint, Michigan reporter and see if you think Terry Camp was putting words in Paul Ryan's mouth. [Read more]

As a political blogger, I have long had a reputation as a pragmatic, level-headed fellow who often uses humor in lieu of shrillness. While I am proud of this reputation, it is one that has kept me from achieving the popularity I so rightly deserve. That is why, as of today, I will be changing my positions and attitudes to better take advantage of the current political atmosphere.

You see, with the U.S. election scant weeks away, I have yet to give my readers the passion, anger and outright falsehoods they truly desire. That is why, as of today, I will begin to produce blog posts that readers desire. In the upcoming days, I shall be releasing several new blog posts, including:

MITT ROMNEY WILL END DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA [Read more]

Now that the dust has settled on the first Presidential debate (though it still echoes through Romney's good poll yesterday from Pew, and whiny flagellations about it, like that of Andrew Sullivan today), we are getting a clearer picture of where the numbers are, and where this election is.  The answer is that it is presently a jump ball, though that state of affairs is close to the best possible present standing for Romney, leaving Obama far more opportunities to improve.  This election will be decided in Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia, and New Hampshire.  President Obama will win it if he either performs at rough parity with Mitt Romney in coming debates, or if he wins what amounts to a coin flip, because the probability of winning if he does not is essentially 50/50. [Read more]

I think here is where his 47% comments will hurt him the most, where Obama's team defining Romney as the Bain CEO who wants to ship your jobs overseas in order to pad his Cayman Island bank accounts.... [Read more]

While I like to read a variety of opinion, both liberal and conservative, I must write to dissent from the hackery at RealClearPolitics.  Let me count the ways it is a bad website undeserving of thoughtful readership. [Read more]

NOTE:  This is a repeat of a blog post from October, 2010, the year the Democrats lost the edge by losing the House to the Tea Party and the Right Wing.  If it looks like I'm nagging, what you're reading is pure desperation.  If the lines in bold-face look like I'm gloating because I was right, look more closely.  They're covered in bitter tears.

I'm repeating this because we're at that place again and if we couldn't afford to lose in 2010 we really, truly can't afford to lose in 2012. [Read more]

Because of Obama's terrible debate performance we are staring a Romney presidency in the face and I am trying to come to terms with the possibility that after living through Bush/Cheney, Mitt Romney's mug will be on the T.V. screen for eight years. My gut is so sore from thinking about a failed Obama and a new Romney presidency that my health may be failing. So I am changing gears and adjusting. Certainly I will cancel my cable subscription. I am also threatening to move to Canada but I already have a house an hour from the border so I'm not sure that moving sixty miles North achieves all that much.  [Read more]

Hey folks. As some of you may have noticed, dagblog has become somewhat sluggish in maturity. When she was brand new, she zipped along like a peppy new sports car. But over the years, she has filled out a bit. The server is groaning under the weight of some 8,777 blog posts and 96,105 comments, and dag's reaction time has slowed to a crawl. [Read more]

What makes someone with autism tick?

There is a website called the Autcast that said recently that "Asperger's syndrome is the new black."

I think that's a pretty apt comparison. Like black people, Aspies and autistics have trouble fitting in. Programs aimed to help us often marginalize us. We have problems of dependency, lack of understanding. On a small scale, people are even afraid of us as soon as we walk in the room. Black people were and have been associated with gang violence - mass murderers like Cho Seung Hui and James Holmes have been thought to be autistic and, to be honest about it, probably were. (Post a comment about this and I'll be willing to elaborate, if you want.) [Read more]

Let's get one thing out of the way. PBS's educational programming is the most successful distance-learning effort in history. Nothing else comes close. Every conservative should love it. But many of them don't. When a conservative starts hating on PBS, they're telling you why they're a conservative, and it's not because they hate government programs that don't work. It's because they hate government programs that do work. [Read more]

Mitt Romney, Mormon Meets The Eye

Mitt Romney, Centrist in Disguise! [Read more]

Emile Griffith was one of the great boxers in the history of the game. Throughout his career, there were rumors regarding his sexuality. Those rumors came to a climax during Griffith’s third fight with Benny “Kid” Paret, who had spent the build-up of the fight taunting Griffith about these rumors.

“I got tired of people calling me faggot,” Griffith told Bob Hebert years later. “He called me a name. … So I did what I had to do.” [Read more]

This is hardly a deep observation and it's certainly not very complicated, but a good chunk of Mitt Romney's argument for his candidacy is that he will undo and then redo the major legislation of the Obama administration.

Romney would repeal health care reform, a national version of the legislation that he championed in Massachusetts and would then be left back at square one on the issue, with more than 70 million uninsured and people with pre-existing conditions left to the mercies of emergency care.  To fix the problem, he would then try to recreate his success in Massachusetts, state by state.  Of course, all of the states will never go along and it will take forever, but what's another thirty years of this problem? [Read more]