OK, somebody explain this to me.

Obama held a three-point lead among white voters in the state while Clinton had a twenty-seven point lead among Hispanic voters.

Link

I know that talking about Latino/African-American voting patterns is a potential minefield, and I do not want to set off a "you're a racist scumbag" innuendo-fest, but I'm just struck by this number.  A 27-point lead.  Why is Hillary Clinton so strongly supported by the Latino community in CA?  I'm not saying she should be or she shouldn't be, but why?  

These Kucinich diaries (and no, this is not another one) seem to be showing up the old divide between those who see politics as a practical enterprise, are resigned to the two-party system and want to see Democrats get elected, and those who think that our politics need to be radically transformed and are only willing to support politicians who will further that goal.

I don't know if I'm trying to channel my outrage or just back up to where I can see something else...like the fucked up way of thinking that allows something like this to happen.

Grover Norquist said, "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

That was always an ugly metaphor, but never so much as now, when for the last week we have seen the victims of Mr. Norquist's crusade drowning in the "bathtub" that used to be the city of New Orleans. How very prescient of him. How proud he must be.

Frank Rich of NYT writes about "The God Racket", featuring Yul Brynner, Tom DeLay and a cast of thousands, coming to a formerly-secular space near you:

A reader points out in response to a previous post that we're leaving plenty behind in Iraq: depleted uranium, flattened cities, dead people, hate. Fair enough. And that legacy and its consequences will remain, maybe forever. It's all the things we say we didn't intend that will live on. Meanwhile, our grandiose plans--our sense that we could make a people over into the image of ourselves and that they would be happy about it--are collapsing under their own delusional weight. It's everything we said we did intend that will disappear as if it never existed.

And that's as close to a definition of futility as I can think of.

Hope that helps.

Hot Flash Hell

In the desert of southern Utah, where I live most of the time, we are surrounded by the legacy of ancients; the ruins and rock art are part of the timelessness of a landscape that reveals itself in billion-year-old layers of stone.

There is a fourth dimension of time that you can see and touch, and it makes the desert vivid and strong, more real than mere three-dimensional reality. Maybe my reverence for it comes naturally--I like old things, and I was taught to respect my elders--but it seems to demand it too, unforgiving beauty always ready to remind me of my place in the scheme of things.

We report, you decide:

Last Sunday I had the experience of attending a Baptist worship service. I felt like the proverbial fly on the wall, but leaving that aside, it was an interesting picture of a faith and a culture that I don't entirely understand and probably don't want to.