Ladies special sale going on at Act Blue - donate to their Better Democrat female candidates and someone with big pockets matches the funds. (Okay, you can give to the dudes as well but there you're paying full tab). So belly up to the bar, name your flavor.

Only 3 shopping/drinking days left till payout.

Early indicators are out from Politico of who's in or likely.

I took a quick look based on my post on heavy women voting, and based on the early Politico list I'd say the women need to jockey better for position. Supreme Court likely a woman, Commerce Secretary yes, UN Ambassador yes (but Kathleen Kennedy on the short list? Uggg.). Chief of Staff looks unlikely, Treasury looks unlikely, and there are a few more, but overall doesn't look like any big paybacks. And then Lugar?

So discuss below anything to do with his Administration picks, whether from a female angle or just simply wish-lists and evaluation (also a minorities angle would be interesting. Aside from Richardson, Rice and Jarrett didn't do a close look.

Anyway, have a look, and if you don't like what you see, now's the time to start complaining. By mid-November it'll be too late.

PS, I just posted on a Ladies Special on donations at Act Blue, but if you want your bucks to go twice as far, head over and take advantage. Blue Dog democrats simply aren't good enough anymore.

See, I have to blame it on Mike Royko, because for some reason I believed he always fictionalized everything. And with a name like Studs Terkel, why would I believe this guy existed except for some journalist's avid imagination. My loss.

A few times last century someone simply wrote down or in some other fashion recorded what we do, and simply created a work of indelible importance. Simple yet groundbreaking. The Kinsey Reports. The Man with the Camera. Working. Sure, everyone works. And we all think we understand what we do. And then we start talking about it and it becomes Terra Incognita, something we never really understood at all.

If you have some time, check out the NPR report much later:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3892055
Or Hard Times:
http://www.studsterkel.org/htimes.php
I don't know if the era's officially passed, but between Royko & Terkel, it's two I'd rather have hang around for a while. But life doesn't work like that. We all have to go sometime. So let's just say I'll be keeping a seat warm for you at the local tavern. Just in case you decide to drop in.

Okay, Jack's got a bit of foot-in-mouth disease, what with his unfortunate "racist" and "redneck"" backpedaling, but back there in 2004-2006 he was one of the few sane LOUD voices speaking out against torture and screwed up operations in Iraq, calling for a withdrawal and earning the scorn of fall-in-line Republicans and Blue Dog ("shhhh, not so loud, someone might hear you") Dems. Even called a "coward" by one uppity Jean Schmidt.

So in a year of happy stories (for Dems), Murtha is in for a tough race. Share the wealth if you have it ("socialist redistribution of wealth", for any Republican lurkers) and help out a man who once did much to help us re-find our collective backbone. (Why he was passed over for Steny Hoyer as House leader escapes me).

http://www.actblue.com/page/vvpetersmurtha

Was McCain & the C*** word too ugly for the media to print?

Or as Ben Smith at Politico informs, was never confirmed as actually happening? But of course it's a nice rallying point for the left to smear the other guy as using ugly demeaning language towards his wife. Oh, and those planes McCain crashed? Turns out it was 1.

While I'd say the right has been quite over the top on its lies, that doesn't mean the left doesn't resort to quite a few itself. Smear sells, and sometimes the truth just isn't good enough.

So think about how much your impression of McCain not respecting women is based around this one unsourced (oh, "3 anonymous sources who won't speak because they're scared" - ha ha ha, that's worthy of Drudge) rumor? Or continually beating him up because he got divorced 7 years after coming home from 'Nam?

It's not just winning the election, it's how you got there too.

For all the talk about Sarah Palin wooing the disaffected Hillary fans, well I guess the net effect is a lot more turnout by women in this rather unusual year. As in women make up 57-58% of the voters in George and North Carolina so far. Of course I'd wager that this female vote is more mavericky than a few candidates who claim trademark on the word. I.e. I don't think we'll have a tanning booth in the White House come this time next year.

However I'm also wondering what the payback will be - if Obama's constituency ends up heavily tilted towards women by a 16% gap, what does this mean in terms of cabinet appointments and policy priorities? Early June it seemed like Obama was ramping up on female talent at the top, but it's not clear how serious that effort went. Meanwhile, it's notable that while the bailout "victims" have been passing out multi-million dollar bonuses, the top female CEO last year, Indra Nooyi from Pepsi, made only $12.8 million. (The top male CEO racked up over $180 mill, and Nooyi ranks 139th in compensation. Of the Fortune 500 CEO's, only 13 are women.)

So while we're already seeing a lot of Warren Buffet (who's putting some serious cash down on some leveraged bailout babies) tied in with this Administration, maybe we should start asking about where the Indra Nooyi's are. Because with all the heavy lifting women are doing in this campaign, it'd be a shame to find out that all the invites to the party have already got sent out.

Or maybe Da Doo Don Don. I have a code in my node, and I can't stop saying the D words.

Anyway, Chris Bowers continues his efforts to be singularly relevant - i.e. you don't just have to give to a candidate, you can run your own campaign ads or issue ads. No need to book a month ahead for a media buy. Got someone in your state to support? Take out a small ad, you can count the clicks. Democracy in your hip pocket. Sometimes it's the little people who need the most support - and you can look after them the best. 6 more shopping days till D-Day.

Ask Americans where the worst atrocities are in Africa, and they're likely to point out Sudan with it's long war of attrition against the Christian of the south, or perhaps Zimbabwe - not so much for atrocity but for Mugabe's ham-handed anti-democratic governing. A few might mention Liberia and Sierra Leone, though those have mostly calmed down ("died down" being a little too close to the truth), while Uganda brings images of the fight against AIDS.

But the Congo wins hands down. 5.4 million dead since 1998, and today's Times points to more troops on the move in the east, the continual lake region War of Africa that includes Rwanda and Burundi and other proxy armies.

And it also includes likely the most brutal place on earth to be a woman, what with being held to slave labor, repeated gang rape by militia, lack of basic amenities like shoes for torturous work in the jungle, and carrying weights far past their bodies' capacity.

But the Sudan's marketing department is much better. We get Muslims vs. Christians. We don't quite get "marauding warlords killing for minerals". Titanium? They're fighting over Titanium? What is Titanium anyway? Nope, doesn't cut it. So our eyes gloss over and we go back to Mugabe, white vs. black, colonialism vs. freedom fighter or nationalist exploiting open wounds, an annoying but much smaller problem in the shadow of 5.4 million dead and a huge nation still in barbarous chaos. But better defined. We like our chaos well defined.

As long as we get our basic facts and our basic understanding of the world wrong, our policies are unlikely to help the world to much, unless by some miracle we back into success.  And the world of 2008 is much more complicated than the typical attention deficit-challenged brain can manage. Meanwhile the rest of the world sits back in fear and amazement.