Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:33 AM

Ian's posted his observations how the "bad" quarto works as a play, with many of the thoughts I said I'd write up later.

We're heading out, and will probably be offline for the rest of the day. Enjoy!

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:11 AM

[Crossposted to bard_in_boston]

Hamlet, as we know it, was first printed in 1604.

But a year earlier, another version of the play, also credited to Shakespeare, was printed. And this one isn't quite so familiar.

To be, or not to be, I there's the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,

This version is generally referred to as the "bad" quarto, and is often held up for derision.

Scholars still debate its origins -- it could be an early draft, an afterthought deliberately shortened for tour, a piracy reconstructed from memory, or something else entirely.

Regardless of the explanation, the "bad" quarto of Hamlet is little respected and less performed.

Which is why I was chomping at the bit to see it since I first heard UNH was giving it a go.

I've jokingly dubbed the first quarto Hamlet (henceforth Q1) as "action Hamlet," and last night's performance certainly upheld that belief. The story is incredibly streamlined. It ran barely two-and-a-half hours (plus a 15 minute intermission), a full hour shorter than ASP's current production.

And, in many respects, this pace works much better. The story really flows, and lacks many of the reversals and introspections of the standard text. [On the drive back from Durham, Ian and I came up with our own theories to explain the differing texts, which I'll save for a later entry, to rush out this review.] But how sacriligeous is it that I may prefer the "bad" quarto?

This is a college production, so it would be unfair to compare with professional companies. That proved sometimes difficult, having so recently seen ASP (my favorite local Shakespeare company) in similar scenes.

But the cast did admirable jobs. The usurping king (never actually called Claudius in the text), is written much more villainously in this version. And CJ Lewis played him as a truly unctuous skeeve running a brutal court.

Critics who complained that Ben Evett made his Hamlet too angry too early, should see what Q1 does to the character. Aaron Sharff was furious from the getgo, but in this story it worked. I've always wanted to see Hamlet played by someone younger (and more appropriately impetuous) and Sharff was everything I hoped for. Not only was he fun to watch, but it didn't hurt that he was quite easy on the eyes.

I had mixed emotions towards Rachel Brodeur's Ophelia during her first few scenes. I just couldn't quite get a handle on the character. She was dressed far more casually than anyone else on stage, even her own family -- perhaps hinting at a lower-class background that her father and brother were trying to overcome? But once she went mad, she was captivating. With her hair unbound and nightgown-clad, she was incredible.

The traditionalist in me really appreciated the fact that the Ghost entered and exited from "hell" (a trap in the stage), accompanied by fog machines. I can't explain what kind of sound amplification they used for the Ghost's voice, but Tucker Samsom Cummings was an appropriately unnerving apparition.

I was also really impressed by the lighting during the ghost scenes. The red lighting on the backstage added both a note of danger and first rays of dawn. My compliments to the crew.

A few directorial decisions didn't work well for me. Gertred was played too... promiscuously... for my tastes. While I could buy Marya Lowry's giddy infatuation, Rachel Louise Elias seemed too indiscriminate in her affection, and too much a lush for the role as written in Q1 -- the lone version in which the queen is undeniably innocent and ignorant.

This play was much more casually violent than many productions, with Corambis, Rossencraft and Gilderstone (Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) the most frequent targets. But while this worked in some scenes, it often seemed overdone -- even inappropriate at times, where the actions contradicted the words.

Still all-in-all, this was a fascinating production that's given me much to think about.

Only two shows left: tonight and tomorrow matinee!

Details @ http://www.unh.edu/theatre-dance/productions.html

Durham, NH, is about 90 minutes north of Boston via Route 95. And Friday night's performance had plenty of seats available.
If you have a chance to see the bad quarto, here or elsewhere, I highly recommend the experience.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:20 PM

My plans for this weekend:

• Tonight (7pm): Hamlet ("bad" quarto) @ UNH
• Tomorrow matinee (2pm): Titus Andronicus @ Wellesley
• Tomorrow night (8pm): Twelfth Night @ Providence

Three Shakespeares in three states in two days.

Sound like fun?

More details about all these shows @ Bard in Boston.

Anything interesting going on in your lives?

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:52 AM

I've posted this warning several times before, but I feel it bears repeating:

When copying and posting OKCupid results, perform a quick find-and-replace to eliminate their googlebombing.

Search and remove this phrase:

<A href="http://www.okcupid.com"><IMG src="http://is3.okcupid.com/graphics/0.gif" border="0" alt="free online dating"/></A>

This change will not affect the display of your results in the slightest.
[0.gif is a 1 pixel square invisible image -- it's intented as deception!]

This is yet another example of what Seth Finkelstein terms Search Engine Optimization and the Commodification of Social Relationships.

Sure, the quizzes are fun, and they spread conversationally among friends who read each others' blogs.

But just because you take an OKCupid quiz, that shouldn't turn you into an advertiser equating OKCupid with "free online dating"

Every time you just reuse their test results without editing out that link, you're perpetuating the connection and skewing searches for the phrase.

Furthermore, since the image is hosted on their server, OKCupid can use it like SiteMeter to track where they're getting hits.

Isn't your privacy worth that much?

PS: Hey, Google! if you're seeking ideas for adjusting PageRank to combat SEOs, any way of just ignoring links where the source anchor is a 1x1 pixel image?

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:44 AM

Q1 Hamlet is indeed "bad" Hamlet, and will continue to be bad so long as we rank the early texts of the play on the basis of their adherence to culturally predetermined standards of literary excellence. Given that "To be or not to be" in its traditional form is itself generally regarded as a touchstone for rarefied, discriminating taste -- a pinnacle of literary artistry -- any attempt to assert the value of an alternative version of the immortal lines is automatically defined as evidence of a tin ear, an inability to appreciate the sublimity of Shakespeare. The matter is therefore unarguable within the established limits of the inquiry: "To be or not to be" in its traditional form is quintessential Shakespeare.

After I finish the book (one chapter to go), I'm going to have to send Leah Marcus the Rowan Atkinson/Hugh Laurie Hamlet sketch. [Previously blogged here, with links to transcripts]

If she hasn't seen it, I think she'll be amused.

I am such a geek, sending chatty letters to academics after reading their scholarly books for pleasure...

BTW, I think I can stop angsting over whether or not I deserve press tickets.

I just got ASP's latest email announcement. They quote two Hamlet reviews: Ed Siegel of The Boston Phoenix, and Ian's from Bard in Boston.

They like us. They really like us.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:30 PM

Earlier this summer, Bush's reading habits made the news. I blogged about it here, here, and here.

From an aside in Firedoglake, I see the president mentioned it during yesterday's press conference:

Q Mr. President, may I ask you if you have any metrics you'd be willing to share about your reading contest with Mr. Rove.
THE PRESIDENT: I'm losing. I obviously was working harder in the campaign than he was. (Laughter.)
AUDIENCE: Oooooh!
THE PRESIDENT: He's a faster reader.

Now, The Singer's crown is the 79th book I've read this year.

I regularly read copious numbers of books every year. But, well, I've gotten a lot of experience in balancing life and words (or not expecting so much out of life so I have time to read) and I don't have the kind of high-stakes job our President is supposed to be doing.

Clearly, Bush and Rove should leave the competitive reading to those better equipped for such pursuits. I believe elementary schools regularly hold such programs. With stickers and prizes, even.

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:50 PM

One other interesting point about Unediting as it concerns Taming of The Shrew.

In particular, this quote really made me pause:

Second-wave feminists sometimes got around the misogyny of the play by claiming that Shakespeare had handled the case of the shrew as positively as the culture and literary tradition would let him.

As I've pointed out elsewhere, the existence of John Fletcher's sequel, Tamer Tamed demonstrates the attitudes in Taming of The Shrew were by no means universally accepted in the times.

Likewise, Dr. Marcus argues that Taming of A Shrew is, in many ways, less misogynistic than The Shrew: it provides a different justification in Kate's submission speech (Garden of Eden metaphors, rather than modelling it on political sovereignty and treason) and further undercuts that message with (1) Petruchio's reaction, (2) followup comments by Bianca and Lucentio, and (3) the Christopher Sly conclusion.

Indeed, it appears that if one looks at Taming of A Shrew, Taming of The Shrew and Tamer Tamed together, then the version generally accepted as canonically Shakespeare is anomolously misogynistic in comparison.

Isn't that disturbing.

And, about Shakespeare productions in general:

The Taming of the Shrew we have seen on stage during the last decade or two has increasingly resembled A Shrew in its ending. Directors employ the return of Christopher Sly as a device for denying or at least mitigating the "reality" of the taming plot, which carries overtones of oppressive brutality toward women that are difficult for modern audiences to tolerate. Meanwhile, our standard editions continue to label the Sly epilogue as non-Shakespearean. There is nothing new about this disjunction. During the long performance history of the play, there has frequently been a wide gap between what passes as genuine Shakespeare in the printed text and what is accepted as Shakespeare in performance.

Modern theater-goers certainly seem to care more about authenticity than our forebearers in the age of Garrick.

Indeed, we often hold the rewritten Shakespeares of earlier periods up for mockery and scorn.

But how much has really changed?

Theater companies regularly trim and rearrange Shakespeare's plays. I've seen Merry Wives with only two suitors, Midsummer Night's Dream where Titania and Oberon fought before any of the Athenian lovers appeared onstage, Taming of The Shrew with an added royal speech at the conclusion, and several Love's Labours where musical numbers replaced entire chunks of dialog. During the Hamlet conversations, I read along while ASP and S&C acted. And even (especially?) among the most talented companies, there were trims and edits.

The only difference is, these plays are all advertised as Shakespeare with no caveats.

The same kinds of changes take place as in the past, but (if anything) Garrick and Tate were more honest about it.

They may have been egotistical, but at least they made their revisions public. Indeed, they often published them, so even today we can look back and evaluate the changes they made. Just try doing that with your local Shakespeare companies.

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:50 PM

So, I finished The Singer's crown by Elaine Isaak last night.

To explain the setup, I'll excerpt the Kirkus Reviews summary:

Rhys, now called Kattanan, is the last of the Rinvien line. His three brothers and his mother, the Queen of Lochalyn, were murdered by his uncle Thorgir, who seized the crown. Thorgir spared Rhys but ordered him castrated to avoid future succession disputes. Raised in a monastery dedicated to Goddess worship, Kattanan becomes a talented court singer, traded from realm to realm as human collateral.

The Kirkus review ends on a negative, criticizing the book for "an unduly Byzantine plot, even by genre standards."

It is a very complex story.

But frankly, it reminded me a lot of Elizabeth Bear's plotting style (specifically Blood and iron). Huge crowd of characters, and while folks may work together to achieve particular goals, their underlying motivations vary. Allegiances change, and there are few absolute allies or enemies.

Ian referred to it as LARP fiction, where even "minor" characters have their own stories and paths.

Are Bear and Isaak part of a new trend in SFF?

Unediting the Renaissance continues to fascinate.

Part of the author's point is that literary criticism and editing are often treated as wholly separate and independent ways of regarding a text. And yet, if literary critics only look at the text after editors have 'cleaned it up' then they're overlooking a great deal. This is particularly true for texts which have multiple sources (such as A & B texts of Doctor Faustus or Shakespeare plays with pre-Folio quartos). Furthermore, we can gain insight into the editors' mores (and a sense of the times) by looking at how the texts are edited and/or scholarly trends in preferred interpretations.

Her introduction provides a broad history of these trends, and I can definitely recognize influences that shaped the way I have viewed Shakespeare. But until now, I hadn't always recognized the ideology and theories behind some of the received wisdom, and merely took them as truths.

Marcus describes the dominant model of the late 19th century as an evolutionary one, with "bad" quartos considered earlier rougher drafts, superceded and improved by later revisions. In the 20th century came a more Platonic, monolithic view of the "Work" which we only see through imperfect transmissions. In this light, "bad" quartos are more often derided as pirated reconstructions. [That's certainly how I was 'raised' to view the bad quarto of Hamlet.] But piracy is an extremely loaded term, and the creators of "bad" quartos are often called "compilers" rather than "authors." More on that in a minute.

But lately, she's perceived a new model coming into the fore, which she describes as networked: more comfortable with ambiguity, and interested in investigating differences between versions rather than trying to rank them qualitatively.

As both computer technology and poststructuralist theory have made inroads into the field of literary studies, most of us have come to think of texts as more malleable, less fixed, than we did before. If texts are generated by computer, the idea of the "original" loses much of its charisma: how can we reliably differentiate "originals" from copies? Printing out our own computer-generated work, we have ourselves become printers and designers on a small scale, and may therefore take more interest in past modes of book production and the ways in which format can influence interpretation.

I don't know enough academic politics or history of lit crit to evaluate the accuracy of her portrayal, but it certainly lines up with the ways I hear other current students and writers talking about Shakespeare.

Back to the notion of "bad" quartos, Marcus conducts a close-reading of editorial introductions to the plays:

Textual discussions of [plays with a "bad" quarto lurking somewhere in their past] invariably begin on a note of cool objectivity -- just what one might expect from an inquiry into scientific bibliography -- but that tone is quickly abandoned for a surprisingly vehement language of vilification. It is a pattern encountered by anyone reading the front-matter of a standard edition of one of Shakespeare's multi-text plays, but not, perhaps, quite as strange in our perceptions as it should be.
 <snip>
While Q is corrupt and unreliable, F has occasional "imperfections," most of them attributable to the transcriber or to the demands of censorship. Q is described in a language of transgression markedly different from the careful qualifications surrounding F. Even though the Editor has stated as given that Q is memorially reconstructed, he feels called upon to enumerate some of its flaws, which are determined to be signs of corruption through comparison with the folio version. This is quite a standard procedure in the discussion of bad quartos, but we will note that it is self-contradictory.

For example, in comparing Taming of The Shrew with Taming of A Shrew:

Kate's speech of submission in A Shrew is very different from the parallel passage in The Shrew. The very few recent editors who have discussed it have, following the traditional pattern of debasing the "bad" text in order to exalt the "good" one, found A Shrew's version of the speech more irredeemably sexist than the authorized Shakespearean version. I would characterize it instead as offering a different and more traditional mode of patriarchal argument. Whether we regard it as more or less misogynist will depend on our evaluation of different modes of patriarchy.
 <snip>
[In] the climactic moment in which Kate offers to place her hand beneath her husband's foot, for example, the standard editorial argument against the quarto version is that

the imitator, as usual, has caught something of the words of the original, which he has laboured to reproduce at a most unusual sacrifice of grammar and sense...he has by omitting the words "in token of which duty" omitted the whole point of the passage.

I have argued earlier that the "imitator," instead, is making a different point: Katherine is not placing her hand beneath her husband's foot as a symbolic affirmation of her status "beneath" him, but as a flamboyantly masochistic assertion the basic purpose of which is to win the bet for her husband. Both passages are violently patriarchal on the surface, but in A Shrew the surface message is undercut by the tamer himself and is thus less "genuine" as an articulation of patriarchal values.

I still haven't finished the book, but it's definitely thought-provoking...

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:45 PM

I'm hardly the first to point this out, but I remain rather amused that the last two GOP Senators to concede were Burns and Allen.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:44 AM

Jeralyn shares her moment of fame on CNN and The Daily Show.

[Had I gone to Deval's victory party on Tuesday night, I would've worn my "I'm blogging this" T, just to see whether that would affect my reception.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:15 PM

I left the book I'm in the middle of -- Singer's crown by Elaine Isaak -- at home this morning.

I've still got the printouts of the current chapter of Unediting the Renaissance -- which I can (and probably will) read over lunch -- but even though I do consider that pleasure reading, there's a difference between a work of scholarship and mass-market fantasy...

PS: Ian tended bar at Deval Patrick's victory party last night. His account.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:11 AM

Oy, I'm tired.

Two best quotes from the morning blogosphere.

Bob Harris:

And here the Republicans thought the voters would greet them as liberators...

Robert Farley:

I have to hand it to him, Jonah manages to put together a great line every now and again. Were he not his mother's son, he might have amounted to something in this world, perhaps becoming a minor pop culture pundit instead of an embarassment.

I for one welcome our new Democratic overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted rightwing personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

Explainer here.

Of course, one difference between the left and right blogosphere is that no one on the left would need to have that joke explained...

Heh.

Good show, everyone. Now it's up to Virginia and Montana...

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:07 PM

Ian voted over the noon hour.

After returning home, he blogged:

I was voter #382, according to the little counter on the ballot box, and I asked the poll worker how many voters there are in Ward 1, Precinct 2. There are something like 1060 or so, so, by noon, we had a third of the eligible voters turn out already. And the highest turnout is usually after work. She was expecting at least 65% or so, for a midterm election.

During the primary in September, I finally cast my ballot around 7:30 pm -- one-half hour before closing.

At that time I was voter #368.

So, more votes cast before noon today than the September primary.

Pretty hopeful sign for democracy...

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:00 AM

Have you?

Reader roll-call... Sound off!

Ballot #111 in the machine; there was actually a wait for a booth. My only regret is that the polling place didn't have those little triumphal stickers...

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:00 PM

Just a quick recap of the bullet points I posted Sunday night:

Arianna Huffington:

“This election is about the fact that Republicans have made us less safe and that Congressional oversight is critical

  “don't make us even less secure over the two years they have left”

Josh Marshall:

“things are seriously off course but the folks in charge won't admit it and don't know what to do about it”

Andrew Sullivan:

“this is not an election anymore. It's an intervention.

  “the president, the commander-in- chief. He gets the credit if he wins, he takes the blame if he fails. He has failed.”

Wesley Clark:

“administration seemingly can not, or will not, make hard choices

  “The only hope ... is a Congress ... willing to play its constitutionally required role of counter balance to a misguided executive”

The Newcastle News of Lawrence County, PA:

“horrified at the incompetent, arrogant and downright delusional behavior of the Bush administration, change is absolutely crucial

  “America can't afford the status quo.”

The New York Times:

“An administration convinced of its own perpetual rightness and a partisan Congress determined to deflect all criticism of the chief executive

  “It is frightening to contemplate the new excesses he could concoct”

Digby:

“You have the choice of two people to solve the problem --- the one who caused the problem, refuses to admit it even is a problem and won't change anything even as the problem grows worse --- or the other one. Which do you choose?”

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:00 PM

One more observation while skimming the news over lunch:

From Ted Haggard's sermon last week, four days before accusations of his gay affair became public: “Heavenly Father give us grace and mercy, help us this next week and a half as we go into national elections and Lord we pray for our country. Father we pray lies would be exposed and deception exposed. Father we pray that wisdom would come upon our electorate ...”

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:54 PM

Via Josh Marshall:

I'M SHOCKED, SHOCKED.

Saddam's verdict of death was read out yesterday. But apparently only that -- death. Not precisely what he was convicted of or why. One of NBC's blogs explains ...

The full verdict, a document of several hundred pages, explaining how and why today's judgment was reached was not released. U.S. officials said it should be ready by Thursday. So why issue the verdict today? U.S. court advisors told reporters today it was delayed mainly for technical reasons.

They put in all manner of caveats explaining how there's no proof the verdict was timed for political purposes. But it certainly seems like they couldn't actually get the verdict ready for the November 5th slam dunk. So they announced it for US electoral benefit. And they'll do their best to get the actual verdict done by Thursday.

The folks over at Think Progress add:

The court was created by the administration-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority and the administration still exercises considerable control over the court. The New York Times reports, "American influence... has been undeniably pervasive, with about 90 percent of the $145 million in annual costs for the court and associated investigations paid for by the United States Justice Department, and lawyers sent by Washington acting as advisers."

Aside: A quick history of Iraqi governance since the invasion, courtesy of Wikipedia:

April 21, 2003 -- June 28, 2004:

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was established as a transitional government following the invasion of Iraq... [T]he CPA vested itself with executive, legislative, and judicial authority over the Iraqi government from the period of the CPA's inception on April 21, 2003, until its dissolution on June 28, 2004.

July 13, 2003 -- June 1, 2004:

The Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) was the provisional government of Iraq from July 13, 2003 to June 1, 2004. It was established by and served under the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
^*[T]he CPA formed the Iraqi Governing Council and appointed its members. The Council membership consisted largely of Iraqi expatriates who had previously fled the country during the rule of Saddam Hussein and also with many outspoken dissidents who had been persecuted by the former regime.

June 28, 2004 -- May 3, 2005:

The Iraqi Interim Government was created by the United States and its coalition allies as a caretaker government to govern Iraq until the Iraqi Transitional Government was installed following the Iraqi National Assembly election conducted on January 30th, 2005.

May 3, 2005 -- May 20, 2006:

The Iraqi Transitional Government was the government of Iraq from the 3rd of May 2005 when it replaced the Iraqi Interim Government, until the 20th of May 2006, when it was replaced by the first permanent government.

May 20, 2006 -- present:

The current government of Iraq took office on May 20, 2006 following approval by the members of the Iraqi National Assembly. This followed the general election in December 2005. The government succeeded the Iraqi Transitional Government which had continued in office in a caretaker capacity until the new government was agreed.

Furthermore, Jim Henley pointed out:

[The first case brought to trial,] Dujail was obviously chosen for its convenience: trials on Saddam's later atrocities would give Saddam's defense team an opportunity to drag into evidence too many inconvenient truths about the footsie his regime played with the Reagan Administration during the time of, oh, the far greater enormities of Halabja and Anfal.

Chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi told reporters that the Anfal trial now in progress for Saddam and others alleged role in gassing and killing Kurds would continue while the appeals process is underway. But if the appellate judges uphold the death sentence, the Anfal proceedings and other cases would be halted and Saddam hanged.

How convenient!

By the way, according to rules of the court, Saddam is entitled to an automatic appeal. However, if the appellate court confirms Saddam's guilt, punishments must be carried out within 30 days.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:55 PM

Josh Marshall and the folks @ Talking Points Memo are all over this.

Here are the details, in brief:

• The National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) is making automated telephone calls, known as "robo calls."
• The calls begin "Hello, I'm calling with information about <Democratic candidate>"
• If the recipient listens to the whole call, it slams the Democrat, spewing all kinds of poison.
• If the recipient hangs up, it calls back multiple times, flooding the line and calling at ungdly hours of the early morning.
  Since the recipient didn't listen to the whole message, they think the Democratic candidate is the one placing the calls.
• This is happening in at least 53 competitive House races.
• FCC rules say all prerecorded messages must "at the beginning of the message, state clearly the identity of the business, individual, or other entity that is responsible for initiating the call."
  The GOP is the entity responsible, but the start of the call only identifies the Democratic candidate.
• Illegal telephone harassment isn't new to the GOP -- New Hampshire RNC directors were found guilty of similar stunts in the 2002 election.

If you hear of anybody getting flooded with robocalls, make sure they know the blame lies with the GOP, not the Democrat who's being doubly smeared.

Also, Josh Marshall and his crew are looking to hear from people who received these calls, so spread the word.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:35 PM

What's at stake in this election?

Molly Ivins lists the litany:

May I remind you what this election is about? Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, unprecedented presidential powers, unmatched incompetence, unparalleled corruption, unwarranted eavesdropping, Katrina, Enron, Halliburton, global warming, Cheney's secret energy task force, record oil company profits, $3 gasoline, FEMA, the Supreme Court, Diebold, Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004, Terri Schiavo, stem cell research, golden parachutes, shrunken pensions, unavailable and expensive health care, habeas corpus, no weapons of mass destruction, sacrificed soldiers and Iraqi civilians, wasted billions, Taliban resurgence, expiration of the assault weapons ban, North Korea, Iran, intelligent design, swift boat hit squads, and on and on.

This election is about that, but much more -- it's about honor, dignity and comity in this country. It's about the Constitution, which gives us this great nation. Bush ran on a pledge of "restoring honor and integrity" to the White House. Instead, he brought us Tom DeLay, Roy Blunt, Katherine Harris, John Doolittle, Jerry Lewis, Richard Pombo, Mark Foley, Dennis Hastert, David Safavian, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove and an illegal and immoral war in Iraq. People, it's up to you.

Arianna Huffington provides a shorter explanation:

This election is about the fact that Republicans have made us less safe and that Congressional oversight is critical to ensure that Bush and company, with their tragically misguided decisions on Iraq and homeland security, don't make us even less secure over the two years they have left. Period. End of message.

Josh Marshall:

Beyond the incompetence, the bungled policies and the lies (which are plenty bad enough), where the country finds itself is a situation in which the leadership of the country either can't see, or won't see, or most likely wants to pretend not to see what a growing majority of the country clearly can see. ... [A]cross the board I think what we're seeing in the country is that sense of disconnect -- things are seriously off course but the folks in charge won't admit it and don't know what to do about it.

Andrew Sullivan on CNN's Situation Room (video):

[I]f you think Katrina was a success, Iraq is now Katrina. Iraq is the foreign policy version of Katrina. And this president cannot handle the reality. And so we have to -- this is not an election anymore. It's an intervention. This man is so in denial. We need to intervene.

Someone has to finally be held accountable. ... It is not the military generals who are to blame for this. It is the president, the commander-in- chief. He gets the credit if he wins, he takes the blame if he fails. He has failed. And voters must take it into account.

Wesley Clark:

The incumbent administration seemingly can not, or will not, make hard choices about the most important issue ever to face government officials: war and peace. The only hope for a national change of course is a Congress far more willing to play its constitutionally required role of counter balance to a misguided executive.

The Newcastle News of Lawrence County, PA is endorsing a straight Democratic ticket:

[I]f you -- like this newspaper -- are horrified at the incompetent, arrogant and downright delusional behavior of the Bush administration, change is absolutely crucial. ... Usually, a party label is a minor factor when it comes to our candidate endorsements. But not this time around. ... America can't afford the status quo.

So is The New York Times:

[O]ver the past two years, the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits. Rather than doing their duty to curb these excesses, the Congressional Republicans have dedicated themselves to removing restraints on the president's ability to do whatever he wants. ... An administration convinced of its own perpetual rightness and a partisan Congress determined to deflect all criticism of the chief executive has been the recipe for what we live with today.

This election is indeed about George W. Bush -- and the Congressional majority's insistence on protecting him from the consequences of his mistakes and misdeeds. Mr. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and proceeded to govern as if he had an enormous mandate. After he actually beat his opponent in 2004, he announced he now had real political capital and intended to spend it. We have seen the results. It is frightening to contemplate the new excesses he could concoct if he woke up next Wednesday and found that his party had maintained its hold on the House and Senate.

Or, as Digby sums it up:

Who You Gonna Call?

Let's say you have a problem. You have the choice of two people to solve the problem --- the one who caused the problem, refuses to admit it even is a problem and won't change anything even as the problem grows worse --- or the other one. Which do you choose?

That's the simple logic of this election.

There are, of course, many affirmative Democratic messages necessary for the future. But right now, this is it.

State and local races are important, too. After all, we're not that far off from the next round of redistricting, where whoever controls the state has undue influence on how congressional boundaries are drawn.

Had Enough?

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:20 PM

As a reward for accomplishing a task that had been hanging overhead, I decided to reward myself with a book or two.

But which books?

I went through my 2006 blog entries for mentions of books (by Amazon links) and extracted those that still interested me, that I haven't yet bought or read, or which haven't been published...

One-hundred eighty-two titles.

A bit too much to write on a scrap of paper and carry along on a shopping