Sentential Links #201

Onward and Upward with the Linkage!

:: On the subject of Gingrich, here's one thing I don't understand. John Edwards' philandering has made him a public pariah, understandably so. But Gingrich's marital behavior was probably even more disgusting. He cheated on his first wife and told her he wanted a divorce while she was recovering from surgery for cancer. He subsequently cheated on his second wife with a much younger aide. It's fairly amazing how Gingrich has managed to avoid any stigma from this. He's just a conservative "ideas guy." (The rule is very simple: It's OK if you're a Republican. If you're a Republican, you get to lie under oath, cheat on your spouse, steal, filibuster anything at all, get hooked on drugs, marry and divorce repeatedly, and generally do whatever you want. Moral standards only apply to Democrats. Haven't we learned this by now?)

:: What I find odd is that there seems to be very little anger simmering to the top- this has been going on for so long, that we sort of have an odd fatalism about it.

:: I'd turn in a cold case crime scene photo essay as my final project.

:: Today many Americans hold him in high regard as a great leader and moral exemplar.

Others remember him as a slaver, a traitor, and a man willing to kill thousands of people for one of the worst causes imaginable.

:: It’s very easy for Kelsey Grammer to be a Conservative Republican because so many people around him are busy at the hard work of not being one.

:: Speaking of stupidity in the South, Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia has declared that April is "Confederate History Month." Why are so many Southerners so damn proud of their slave-owning past? Get this through your heads: the Confederacy was treason, not a government; it was an insurgency, not an actual nation; it does not deserve it's own celebration anymore than Shays' Rebellion does. How about you guys stop electing officials who look back on a white-dominated past when women and blacks were property with such naked wistfulness? (I've never understood Confederate fetishization -- except for the explanatory factor of racism.)

:: This morning, a woman walked by as you were opening the door. And I swear she heard me say Let's go! and throughout her day, now and then, she was glad to think of us - out and about in the spring - while she toiled in a square room under artificial light.

:: Even my mom didn’t seem angry about anything. On the bus ride home she very calmly and pleasantly told me that she "wished I’d never been born."

:: Yesterday we learned about child stars that blossomed into fine young men. Today I have the pleasure of filling you in on the one star that wasn’t so lucky.

:: Because radio waves travel at 186,000 miles per second and sound waves saunter at 700 miles per hour, a broadcast voice can be heard sooner 13,000 miles away than it can be heard at the back of the room in which it originated.

More next week!