Internal Monologue

Ha ha : Facing a primary challenge will make you do strange things. Today Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) voted for Sen. John McCain's proposed spending freeze , just seven weeks after he voted for Obama's stimulus package. Maybe Specter thinks that Obama already saved the economy or something.

Ezra Klein : Something has really gone awry in the House GOP's political operation. They should not have released this document. They certainly shouldn't have released its inane predecessor. And they certainly shouldn't have scheduled their press conference for April Fool's Day. It's really been amateur hour over there, and this budget debacle was simply what happened when they were suddenly challenged to play against the pros. I have always disagreed with Republicans on ideology and policy. But I have often had to begrudgingly admire their ability to frame the debate, get their message out, and convince people to vote for them. But perhaps this was due to a rigid Republican hierarchy that everyone had to fall in line with. Now, it seems like there's no clear Republican leader. Michael Steele? Rush Limbaugh? John McCain? Sarah Palin? Joe the Plumber? Those other guys in the House and Senate whose names elude me at the moment? Now that there's no one giving

Lately, I've been obsessed with the idea of making D&D characters with silly names. There'd be "Stabulous the Fabulous", a charismatic dagger-wielding rogue, "Hackley Kerthwack", his fighter sidekick, and "Explosivus Blastembad", their pyromancer associate. When I was very young, I actually made 4 characters "MU Shmoo" (Wizards were called Magic Users, or MUs back in 1st edition), "Cleric Crunch", "Fighter Fred", and "Grief, the Brief Thief". I felt that if I did not write this down, the thoughts would continue to haunt my mind.

It's really amazing that this penguin species was just discovered. We have so much to learn about our Earth and its inhabitants:

This is very good news (via Hullabaloo ): Jim Webb stepped firmly on a political third rail last week when he introduced a bill to examine sweeping reforms to the criminal justice system. Yet he emerged unscathed, a sign to a political world frightened by crime and drug issues that the bar might not be electrified any more. "After two [Joint Economic Committee] hearings and my symposium at George Mason Law Center, people from across the political and philosophical spectrum began to contact my staff," Webb told the Huffington Post. "I heard from Justice Kennedy of the Supreme Court, from prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers, former offenders, people in prison, and police on the street. All of them have told me that our system needs to be fixed, and that we need a holistic plan of how to solve it." Webb's reform is backed by a coalition of liberals, conservatives and libertarians that couldn't have existed even a few years ago. From Webb's website (

A functioning financial system is an essential utility of modern society, like electricity, police, hospitals, phones, roads, and Internet. Therefore, we should expect the public/private balance of control over these institutions to be tilted more towards the public than it hitherto has been.

There's a movement afoot to make the Electoral College irrelevant by getting enough states to pledge to give their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote that the Electoral College won't matter. Internal Monologue supports this movement. It's made progress since I last checked in: So far, four states representing 50 electoral votes have adopted the pledge: Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland and Hawaii. The concept has been endorsed by newspapers across the country, including The New York Times. Now the Colorado legislature is considering the measure: The debate hits full stride now in Colorado, a state that political analysts say presents a key test for the National Popular Vote project. So far, the states most receptive to doing away with the Electoral College have all been solidly Democratic -- not the swing states that have been high-profile players in presidential elections. But Colorado last year joined a small cluster of newly minted swing states that drew