“Evan Bayh’s Very Long 2009″

It’s safe to say, now that he’s confirmed his impending retirement, that 2009 was a terrible year for Evan Bayh. Pummeled by both the left and the right, Bayh evidently decided he didn’t need to endure any more abuse. That didn’t stop him from taking his time — he waited until just a few days before the filing deadline to let the news slip. Indiana Democrats, already facing a very tough electoral climate, now have little time to collect the necessary 500 signatures from each of state’s Congressional districts to qualify a new contender.

As Chris Cillizza pointed out two months ago, Bayh’s future in the Democratic Party was over long before this announcement (perhaps not coincidentally, Cillizza was also the first to report Bayh’s decision). But more than Bayh’s dimming political prospects, my guess is that what got to Bayh was the distinctly personal tone attacks on him had taken — particularly those on his wife, Susan, who serves on the board of WellPoint, one of the nation’s largest health insurers.

–Huffington Post, 2.15.09

Worthwhile to point out something I posted as a comment:

The charges against Susan Bayh — which, as I noted, are political fair game even if her board work is legal — aren’t personal in the sense that they’re about her weight or looks. But they do necessarily touch on a family relationship.

Page 34

There is nothing particularly illuminating to report about the barney that followed, except perhaps to mention that her Ladyship astounded me with her sofa-work. Up until then, I had always regarded the sofa as a rotten romping-ground, though heaven knows I had been forced to use it often enough with the London debutantes while the parents were snoring away upstairs. The sofa to me was a beastly uncomfortable thing surrounded on three sides by padded walls and with a horizontal area that was so narrow one was continually rolling off it onto the floor. But Lady Makepiece was a sofa-wizard.

My Uncle Oswald, Roald Dahl

Page 148

Chapter 82, The Sofa:

Of the furniture in the room, only the sofa seemed to have understood our moral situation, for it offered the services of its wickerwork so insistently that we accepted and sat down. The particular opinion I have of sofas dates from that moment. They unite intimacy and decorum, and reveal the whole house without one having to leave the living room. Two men sitting on a sofa can debate the destiny of an empire, and two women the charm of a dress; but only by some aberration of the laws of nature will a man and a woman talk of anything other than themselves. That was what we did, Capitu and I. I can vaguely remember that I asked her if she would have to stay long…

Dom Casmurro, Machado de Assis

Wikipedia Talk Pages: Time for a Real Discussion

There still isn’t a very good biography of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, even though he’s supposed to be as smart as that chin scratch technique would imply. Explorers of Amazon will only find a book (The Gentleman From New York) that’s “uncritical” and “a colorful if not always balanced account,” according to Publishers Weekly.

In the meantime, you’d expect the DPM Talk page on Wikipedia to be blowing up. There are brief references to a couple culture war hobbyhorses — flag amendments, an apocryphal quote about “infanticide” — and an intriguing query (from an Ulster Unionist?) asking whether he was “the senator who used to provide the organisations that raised funds in the US for Irish Republican terrorism campaigns in the UK with political protection?”

No, Wikipedia user Chicheley, I was that senator.

Grad students working on some obscure sub-footnote of “The Negro Family” should be doing battle. They could be defining neutral point of view before our eyes.

If this is unreasonable, I don’t want to be reasonable.

Proposal for a Single-Issue Blog

Breakfast nooks.

There’s a lot of source material in the Creative Commons already, and I’d wager that a niche community of enthusiasts who feel the same way as I do (soothed by the phrase, driven by the hope of someday owning one’s own) would contribute more.

Breakfastnook.com is a cynical exercise in search engine optimization and a thinly veiled shell for Google Adwords. No need to improve their Google ranking by actually linking. A competitor could quickly corner the market, no doubt a highly educated and affluent one.

Image (CC) Maggie T.