This is so cool!
From a new article by Corby Kummer in The Atlantic Monthly:
At Irma’s in Houston, Mexican food is in the right hands—mothers’ and grandmothers’…
Check out the Slideshow: “Lunch with Irma”
Why are we not surprised by this story, given all of the crap the GOP has faced lately? Sigh…
Heh. 
Caution: Some adult language…
If only all college ads were this honest… heh. Caution: Some adult language.
The New York Times’ Matt Bai has a long piece on Senator John McCain that is scheduled to run in this Sunday’s Times’ Magazine. The gist of it is summarized thusly:
…McCain is the outlier. Among his fellow combat veterans in the Senate, past and present, he is the only one who has continued to champion the war in Iraq; by contrast, Kerry, Webb and Hagel have emerged in the years since the invasion as unsparing critics of American involvement there. (In a new book, Hagel, who voiced deep concerns about Iraq even as he voted for the war resolution in 2002, predicts that the war will turn out to be “the most dangerous and costly foreign-policy debacle in our nation’s history.”) This divide among old allies may be the inevitable result of a protracted war that has cleaved plenty of American households and friendships. But it may also be that the war is revealing underlying fractures among the Senate’s Vietnam coalition.
In our opinion, it’s also one of the principal reasons why he is the GOP nominee today…
Read the advance version here.
The Washington Post’s Chris Cilizza’s top five Vice Presidential picks for both candidates.
For McCain:
For Obama:
We have a couple of questions regarding Cilizza’s list: Where the hell is Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina for McCain and Senator Jim Webb of Virginia for Obama?!
On Tuesday, John Hammons, a freshman majoring in Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Oklahoma, was elected mayor of Muskogee, a city of 38,000. Hammons, 19, won nearly 70% of the vote over his opponent, according to the Tulsa World.
Alas, my fellow Sooners can’t crow for long: during the campaign, Hammons pledged to transfer to Northeastern State University in nearby Talequah if elected…
Hammons sets the bar high for our PoliSci majors. So… I have but one thing to say to our students reading this post: Get to work at surpassing what Hammons has done!!!
From Paul Burka today:
This is what I keep hearing from well connected folks in Houston: White will go wherever Kay Bailey Hutchison doesn’t. If she runs for governor, he runs for the Senate (in a special election to complete Hutchison’s term); if she stays in the Senate, he runs for governor. Makes sense to me. Two years is forever in politics, but at least as things stand today, I don’t think White could beat Hutchison (I’m assuming that she beats Perry, if he runs), but he would have a good shot at winning a Senate seat.
Hmmm… Sounds about right to us, too — at least from all that we hear among local political consultants “in the know” from both parties. Feel free to cuss and discuss among yourselves while we keep grading final exams…
New York Times photo of Dujiangyan, Wenchuan County, Sichuan Province
Sadly, it looks increasingly like the current casualty estimate from the Sichuan earthquake, which as of this morning was just over 15,000, could rise quite sharply in the coming days. Xinhua reports today that rescue crews who have reached Wenchuan County have been told by local officials in towns such as Yingxiu that only 2,300 of the 10,000 residents appear to have survived the quake. Nearly half of the survivors are badly injured, and they all desperately needed medical help, food and water. The official death figure had originally included only an estimated 500 in Wenchuan.
NPR’s Melissa Block on the Chengdu Diary blog has an absolutely heart-wrenching story of the devastation in Dujiangyan:
At 4:40 in the afternoon, a worker came out and said, “we’ve found a child.” The parents went limp. “Was he about two, wearing a striped shirt?,” the mother cried. The worker nodded. The parents, along with aunts and uncles, sobbed and clutched each other tight. The mother cried out to the worker through her tears one last desperate appeal, “Did you call out to him? Maybe he had just fainted.” Wang Zhilu, two months shy of his second birthday, was found in the arms of his grandfather, with his grandmother holding onto her husband from behind. All three were dead - three among what are likely to be tens of thousands of people who perished in Monday’s earthquake.
As a father-to-be, I could not help but be moved to tears by Block’s story.
On a more positive note, I received a brief e-mail early this morning from one of my PoliSci colleagues at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu and she assures me that all of the students are all well and that they suffered only minor damage on campus.
Courtesy of Busted Tees:
