The New York Times' ran the headline for the story out of the Associated Press today: 'D.C. Madam' Is Found Dead, Apparently in a Suicide

The tragedy occurred Thursday, May 2, at her mother's home in Tarpon Springs, FL -- about 20 miles northwest of Tampa.

I suppose there will be no more revelations about her client lists now.

Two of the powerful Republican officials who were stung by the release of Deborah Jeane Palfrey's telephone records were freshman senator David Vitter -- still serving -- and a senior State Department official named Randall L. Tobias, who resigned.

Related, some indirectly:

The Falls Church News Press has gotten more recognition. Here is an excerpt from a press release Nick sent me.

WASHINGTON CITY PAPER DECLARES THE FALLS CHURCH
NEWS-PRESS "BEST REMNANT OF THE LIBERAL MEDIA"

The following is extracted from this week's Washington, D.C., City Paper, "Best of D.C." Edition, April 18, 2008. It's the first time in 15 years the City Paper has produced a "Best of D.C." edition. Some "winners" were based on reader polls, this is one of many the editors sought to award:

'BEST REMNANT OF THE LIBERAL MEDIA: Falls Church News-Press"

The phrase "the liberal media" might be a big lie outside of Falls Church. But not inside. Since 1991, publisher Nicholas F. Benton has made sure his Falls Church News-Press has afflicted the comfortable within the wealthy and historically conservative city's borders.
While the rest of the reporting world has been zigging right, Benton has zagged left -- and thrived: He was named 2007's Business Person of the Year by the Falls Church city council.
"One thing I have said, 'It's more important to be right than to be fair'," says Benton.

As is my custom I am posting his latest editorial with his permission.

Game on, folks: looks like the GOP has decided that McCain's only chance is against Hillary Clinton, and they are pulling out all the stops to garner more "support" -- in appearance only -- to help defeat any chance of a Barack Obama nomination.

This is classic tactic -- not only a GOP one, but also a Democratic one: remember gaming the system during their primaries to keep their players in the race longer? The Democratic interference was less likely to kill a viable candidate's chances -- the entire Republican field sucked; now it simply sucks with an army of one instead of many. But the Republican party has played this game to great effect before: remember the Lamont/Lieberman primary? ePluribus Media covered the GOP/Lieberman alliance at that time:

• Sealed with a Kiss: Lieberman's "Roving" Independence
• Sealed with a KISS: Strange Bedfellows, Joe Lieberman and the GOP

As long as we're aware of it, we can counter it and let our own voters decide. Let's not be faced with another Liebermanesque type of "victory" due to Republican manipulations.

Is race a deciding factor in the upcoming presidential elections? Should it be?

Last week I asked these questions to my fellow students within the City University of New York’s, City College campus. Most of the 30 students polled seemed to feel uncomfortable answering such a question; others gave interesting responses. Overall, most of the students felt that race shouldn’t be a factor in deciding which candidate the nation puts into the Whitehouse. These answers forced me to think more deeply into why it shouldn’t be and I couldn’t help but find myself thinking that people didn’t say what they truly felt and that these students seemed to stray away from answering the real question: Is race a deciding factor?

Give me that old time religion*

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life just released the results of an indepth survey on Americans and their religion.

Did you know that religion is considered a "vibrant marketplace"? Yes, America, your religion is just another commodity. The faithful are just another kind of consumer shopping around for the religion that best suits his/her individual needs.

Fascinating ... but, the results of the study would seem to indicate that this "commerce" model is failing.

We've all seen "Part I" of "A Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue" -- it's only now winding down its second release. An unlikely pair of politicos and their powerful supporters swept into power on the wings of prayers, and all hell breaks loose, resulting in the most elaborately produced nightmare that the citizens of this nation and the world have ever seen. The Reich-wingers have been ecstatic; the "director's cut" re-release, in 2004, had them swooning in the streets, until the damn critics finally started showing up and giving their reviews.

Now, after a brief hiatus and a writer's strike, it appears as though the production studio for this flick has collapsed -- but a rival company has picked up the option and is reinventing the premise: now, two powerful figures from the opposition party stand ready to take up residence, and the Right is going into conniptions in anxious dread and trepidation...

Promoted. Originally posted 2008-02-23 01:48:56 EST.

Sara Robinson posted an excellent article on Campaign for America’s Future a few days ago, outlining the seven preconditions for violent revolution discussed by Caltech sociologist James C. Davies in a 1962 article in the American Sociological Review. Davies’s work was largely based on the seven "tentative uniformities" identified by another scholar, Crane Brinton, who had studied and correlated the origins of the Puritan, American, French, and Russian revolutions.

“…it struck me,” Robinson writes, “that the same seven stars Brinton named are now precisely lined up at midheaven over America in 2008.”

Bloggers are telling stories from the front lines of primaries and caucuses that look like something from the early 60s — people lining up before dawn to vote in Manoa, Hawaii yesterday; a thousand black college students in Prairie View, Texas marching 10 miles to cast their early votes in the face of a county that tried to disenfranchise them. In recent months, we've also been gobstopped by the sheer passion of the insurgent campaigns of both Barack Obama and Ron Paul, both of whom brought millions of new voters into the conversation — and with them, a sharp critique of the status quo and a new energy that's agitating toward deep structural change.

There's something implacable, earnest, and righteously angry in the air. And it raises all kinds of questions for burned-out Boomers and jaded Gen Xers who've been ground down to the stump by the mostly losing battles of the past 30 years. Can it be — at long last — that Americans have, simply, had enough?

I believe Robinson is so desperately aching for radical change in America, that she sees more hope than really exists. But this can only be a subjective judgment, and the past four decades of seeing my own hopes and aspirations crushed have left me seriously doubting that much is possible in the U.S. But the argument Robinson presents is by no means weak. And, she is a great wordsmith, who delights in taking conservatives behind the proverbial woodshed for a good metaphorical thrashing. So, I pass along these excerpts, the seven preconditions for a Second American Revolution:

Today begins early voting in the Texas primary. I still am undecided...go figure! A friend in Ohio has sent me this little ditty....hmmmmmmmm.

A little boy goes to his dad and asks, "What is Politics?"