Strange Maps has an interesting map of where news breaks in the lower 48 states. Even allowing for population densities, certain areas of the country — notably D.C. and New York City — account for a disproportionate number of the stories. D.C. makes sense due to the number of stories about the federal government. New York City makes less sense when compared to, say, Chicago. By population, Chicago should be about 1/2 of the “news size” of New York, but, in reality, it’s only about 1/5 the size.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates as moderated by ABC.

LINCOLN: Thank you very much, Charlie and George, and thanks to all in the audience and who are out there. I appear before you today for the purpose of discussing the leading political topics which now agitate the public mind.

We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I’m sorry to interrupt, but do you think Mr. Douglas loves America as much you do?

LINCOLN: Sure I do.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But who loves America more?

LINCOLN: I’d prefer to get on with my opening statement George.

STEPHANOPOULOS: If your love for America were eight apples, how many apples would Senator Douglas’s love be?

LINCOLN: Eight.

. . .

LINCOLN: Ahem, I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect slavery will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you love America this much (extending fingers), this much (extending hands slightly), or thiiiiiis much (extending hands broadly)?

LINCOLN: I think we covered this…

GIBSON: If I may interrupt…

LINCOLN: Please.

GIBSON: I noticed, Mr. Lincoln, that your American flag pin was upside down…

LINCOLN: Yes, the wind caught it. Now, as I was saying…

GIBSON: We get questions about this all the time over at Powerline and on Hannity’s talk show. Mr. Douglas has said this is a major vulnerability for you in the fall. So I’ll ask again – do you love America?

LINCOLN: (scowling with a forced smile). Yes.

GIBSON: If your love for America were ice cream, what flavor would it be?

Ok, the allcaps may not be appropriate in the title. Looks like there was a magnitude 5.2 earthquake about 26 miles southwest of Vincennes at 5:30 this morning.

Update Wow, I hadn’t checked the blogs this morning, but it looks like the local blogosphere is abuzz about the earthquake:

Fort Wayne Observed.
Marc Rust.
Berry Street Beacon.
Advance Indiana.
Indiana Barrister.

Update 2 I had thought I’d slept through the earthquake entirely, but Amy reminded me of an incident during the night that must’ve been the earthquake, but which I had forgotten. We have a bookshelf next to the bed with some sliding doors that rattle when the bookshelf is jostled. At some point, I remember thinking that one of the dogs was up against the bookshelf and scratching because the doors kept rattling and rattling. I vaguely recall noticing that none of the dogs were there and trying to move the door into a position that wouldn’t rattle, then laying down and zonking out again. Clearly I wasn’t fully awake.

Sherpas are interesting. Here is “how they work”.

My boy sure does love the firefighter stuff.

Will Statom, the Delaware County GOP voter registration official who assaulted a reporter at the Delaware County Building received a 3 day suspension for his attack. I never tried it, but the places I worked, I would’ve gotten fired if I’d attacked a member of the public. Statom’s reasoning is laughable. He says that he was mad at the Muncie Star Press reporter he tackled for “promoting” a public meeting that he says was “illegal.” The reason the meeting was illegal, according to Statom was because it wasn’t publicized 48 hours in advance. The reason for the notice requirements is to make sure that the public knows about public meetings.

So, if I have this straight, Statom was pissed off because the Star Press publicized a meeting that Statom felt was insufficiently publicized.

Now, I can’t say what Statom’s motivations are; I’m not a mind reader. But, his actions and aggravation make a whole lot more sense if you suppose that delay in processing a flood of new voter registrations generated by the Obama campaign is politically advantageous for the Delaware County GOP. That’d make more sense than his stated position, in any case.

According to a study reported by the Associated Press, Indiana is 4th in the nation in terms of jailing its kids.

Indiana’s 2006 incarceration rate of 415.4 per 100,000 juveniles ages 10 and older trailed only Wyoming (606.1), South Dakota (564.4) and Florida (451.8), the nonprofit, nonpartisan Every Child Matters Education Fund reported in “Geography Matters: Child Well-Being in the States.”

Vermont, at 72.4 jailed juveniles per 100,000, had the lowest rate.

Pansy liberal Vermonters and their gay civil unions have weakened their resolve to jail their families. What kind of family values are those?

Michael Petit, the group’s president, said Indiana’s high incarceration rate stemmed at least partially from the state’s poor ranking in other areas examined in the report, such as child-welfare expenditures, infant mortality and births to teenage mothers.

This looks like a pay-me-now or pay-me-later kind of situation. Hoosiers can typically be expected to go with the “pay-me-later” option since the money is spent in the form of punishment; a kind of outreach with which we are much more comfortable than anything that looks like a handout. It’s our Puritan heritage, I suppose. On the up-side, I guess we can hope that sending them to jail early puts them straight and keeps them from being criminals as adults. But, that’s not my sense of things.

Hunter has another one worth reading. (The back story is that Chris Matthews and David Shuster thought there was something politically noteworthy and significant about Obama declining coffee in favor of orange juice at an Indiana diner.)

The problem is that it is difficult to truly get angry over, anymore, because it is too predictable; the joke has been played too many times, and increasingly badly with each telling. I can understand why a presidential candidate doing badly at bowling would be a fun, two-minute diversion from weightier matters. And I can understand why a presidential candidate speaking imprecisely about a difficult political issue would become political news. The orange juice thing, where we’re trying to pin an “elitist” label on someone because they asked for orange juice instead of coffee?

No. That was the point where the wires crossed, and shorted. There is a point in which a triviality becomes less than trivial, less than banal, and becomes, to use the most technical term for it, deeply and abrasively stupid. There is no spin possible that turns “asking for orange juice” into an issue of elitism or snobbery: there is, in an infinite sea of alternate realities, not one in which asking for orange juice demonstrates an important negative aspect of character. It is stupid. It is aggressively stupid; it is soul-burrowingly stupid; it is mind-fuckingly stupid. It is the kind of stupid that seeps into the rug so that the entire building stinks of stupid for the next ten years whenever the air conditioning comes on. It is the kind of stupid that wounds all those who come into contact with it. It is a stupid that has been rendered physical: it leaves a scar.

[tags]orange juice watch[/tags]

I wanted to link to this, just for the title: John Yoo on the Neoconstitution. Gene Healy analyzes John Yoo and his torture memos.

David Cole has put it, Yoo “was the right person in the right place at the right time…. Here was someone who had made his career developing arguments for unchecked power, who could cut-and-paste from his law review articles into memos that essentially told the president, ‘You can do what you want.’”

In the memo released last week, once again we see a breathtakingly narrow interpretation of what constitutes torture under US law. To rise to the level of torture, the abuse must, Yoo argues, inflict pain equivalent to that associated with “death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions.” Presumably, the rack qualifies under that definition, but hey, what about the thumbscrew?

Such questions ultimately don’t matter much under Yoo’s analysis, because, in his view, Congress lacks the constitutional power to prevent the president from ordering torture: “Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of enemy combatants would violate the Constitution’s sole vesting of the Commander-in-Chief authority in the President.” As Yoo sees it, telling the executive branch not to abuse prisoners is like telling the CINC what weapons can be used to take a hill occupied by the enemy: “Congress can no more interfere with the President’s conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategic or tactical decisions on the battlefield.”

These people are worms.

Lincoln was assassinated 143 years ago today. That turned him from a historical figure into a mythological one. I don’t know others experience, but growing up and learning about the United States, it seemed like Lincoln and Washington were on a different plane from the rest.

John Wilkes Booth is properly recalled as a scoundrel. For all his pretensions toward heroism and gentility, he shot a man in the back of the head and ran.

(H/t Doghouse Riley who has this tagged as part of “Treason in Defense of Slavery” month.)