The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

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Sanders Beat Polls, Still Has to Beat Clinton

By Donal on Wed, 03/09/2016 - 11:08am |

I usually drop off before 9 PM, but I knew I wasn’t going to fall asleep while Bernie Sanders was nursing a slim lead, so I stayed up until AP called Michigan for Sanders at 11:30 or so. I had TPM’s AP link, FiveThirtyEight’s live feed and LisB’s Facebook thread open.

During the reporting phase of the Michigan and other primaries, Nate Silver and Harry Enten took a lot of flak in FiveThirtyEight’s comment feed, which ran along the right side of the screen while Silver, Enten, Carl Bialik, Julia Azari, Aaron Bycoffe, Micah Cohen and others posted their thoughts on the left. Once it seemed clear that Sanders was outperforming the polls, Silver admitted:

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Sanders in Michigan

By Donal on Mon, 03/07/2016 - 10:53am |

One summer, I was one of four white college boys working as summer interns for the Corps of Engineers in Maryland. Most of our coworkers were white folk, but one engineer was Asian and one secretary was African-American. We had a very dignified lady for a boss, who treated us well. A lot of good ol’ boys from other departments would wander in with jokes or stories or just to shoot the breeze. We were taken aback when some hound dog joked about making our boss mother of the year if she’d only let him. She was an attractive woman, but they were both married, and not to each other.

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Flowers for Trumpmentum

By Donal on Sat, 03/05/2016 - 3:55pm |

Once there was a young man from a wealthy family. He studied hard at good schools, and when he was old enough, his father let him drive the company limousine so he could learn how rich people talked. So he learned to be very thoughtless towards other people, and even more obnoxious if they complained. And he learned lots of great words. Later, he wanted to be a real estate mogul like his Dad, and so he wore a suit and a colorful tie, and went to work every day, and made deals with people to build great stuff for very little money, like his Dad.

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Not One Big Happy Party

By Donal on Fri, 03/04/2016 - 8:59am |

Benjamin Studebaker’s Why Bernie vs Hillary Matters More Than People Think has been widely read, and reposted on Huffington Post. If you haven’t seen it yet, read it now.

I’ve been called a political naif for supporting Sanders, and not wanting to accept Clinton as a consolation candidate. My first primary vote was for Jerry Brown, but I had to accept Jimmy Carter as the nominee. Carter was a very unpopular president, and though he now stands out as a very good and compassionate elder statesman, he was considered to have made a neoliberal bargain in the wake of the 1970’s oil shock, which probably contributed to the stagflation that followed.

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Can Sanders Overtake Clinton?

By Donal on Fri, 03/04/2016 - 8:58am |

FiveThirtyEight has a little chart on the right of their main page today [Thursday 3/3/2016]. They have established a target number of delegates that they feel each candidate needs by any given date to eventually capture the nomination:

Candidate – Won/Target – Percentage of Target
Trump – 338/297 – 114%
Cruz – 236/384 – 61%
Rubio – 112/242 – 46%

Clinton – 609/529 – 115%
Sanders – 412/492 – 84%

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I can see the Olympics from my couch

By Donal on Mon, 07/30/2012 - 2:29pm | Sports

My daughter and I spent much of Friday and Saturday in cosplay at Otakon, but I got to watch some of NBC's Olympic coverage — which in some events seemed more obsessively focused on Americans than ever.

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The Agony of the Tweet

By Donal on Wed, 07/25/2012 - 10:59pm | Sports


Athletes, especially Olympians, are to be seen and not heard, or even read. Remember when Crash Davis explains the perfect sports interview to Nuke Laloosh?

Davis: You're gonna have to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're your friends. Write this down: "We gotta play it one day at a time." 

LaLoosh: Got to play... it's pretty boring. 

Davis: 'Course it's boring, that's the point. Write it down.
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Sports
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Roadkill experiment

By Donal on Wed, 07/25/2012 - 11:24am |

Found this on the Dish. When I was a child, Redd Foxx was a guest on some talk show. He and the host were talking about hitting dogs while driving, and throwing out these huge numbers of dogs they had hit. I asked my mother why they would hit dogs, and she said they hit them by accident, but it sure sounded like they didn't care much.

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Closing Ranks

By Donal on Sun, 07/22/2012 - 9:10pm | Politics, Social Justice


I used to work in Central Pennsylvania — just PA to anyone from there. I was there long enough to realize that Penn State was both a revered institution and an 800 lb gorilla. I suppose that's true of other schools, but I have lots of family and friends who attended or worked for PSU, and still do. 

Loyalty to Penn State and faith in JoePa continues to be very strong. On Saturday, in a stealthy 6 AM maneuver, PSU removed the Paterno sculpture, calling it a "distraction." The faithful are appalled. Even my liberal, union brother-in-law is resentful, claiming that the Freeh report is not the last word in the investigation.

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Donal is now posting on a wordpress blog called simply, Donal.

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