At least our torment is over...

Jerry Falwell is dead.

I'm not at all sorry to see him go.

You'll find one compendium of the ways in which he helped demean and debase our public life here.

There is a GOP debate tonight. If you're looking to dull the pain, just invent your own Praising Falwell Drinking Game while watching the debate. I predict you'll be totally bombed in the first quarter hour.

More info about Edwards

I'm supporting John Edwards for President, so I'm fairly familiar with his history and issue positions. I know that he gets attacked by people to the left of me for not being pure enough. So this long but good diary by David Mizner on Daily Kos was helpful, and told me a bunch of things that I didn't know about Edwards: JRE's Journey: Edwards Goes Left. If you're curious about Edwards' past positions and how they inform his current campaign, check it out.

"If you want to send a message, use Western Union"

Thomas Schaller, writing in The American Prospect (free, one-time registration req.), has an interesting article today, Will the GOP Make a Statement?. The nut graf:

So allow me to dispatch with all the "it's way too early" disclaimers and offer a bold prediction about the 2008 presidential contest: Rank-and-file Republicans are going to throw the fight. Rather than make electability their primary criterion for selecting their nominee, GOP primary voters will opt to send a protest message to the party's establishment and Beltway insiders by nominating a statement candidate who is none of the Big Three [McCain, Romney, Rudy].

When I was handicapping the GOP candidates a few days ago, I thought of this, but didn't have anything much to go on. I'm thinking that the most likely candidate for conservatives who are more interested in sending a message than winning would be Brownback.

The Lives of Others

Kevin Drum has a good post today about The Lives of Others, the recent Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film. We saw it with friends right after the Oscars, as I recall. As we left, I remarked, "Well, that was the feel-bad movie of the season." It was clearly intended to be Important Cinema, but it failed to touch my emotions. As Kevin said:

I especially agree...about Gerd Wiesler, the Stasi eavesdropper who mysteriously turns from government automaton into weirdly sympathetic coconspirator with the objects of his eavesdropping. There was simply no serious motivation provided for this transformation. It was almost as if the writer figured he didn't really need to bother.

The film was so unengaging for us that we couldn't remember the name of the Gerd character, immediately after we saw it. So as we were discussing it, one of us said, "Let's call him Bob. Bob Stasi." Which immediately made me think of that dour character doing jazz hands. When you see a movie and are immediately moved to mock it, that's not a good sign.

Come on. Pan's Labyrinth, a brilliant film, lost to this?