The Cooperation Nazi

I'll admit to being paralyzed the last couple of weeks; with the healthcare reform 'negotiations,' there really has been too much preposterousness for me to process, much less post. But back on the horse with everyone's favorite totally not-senile recent presidential candidate, John McCain, speaking today on repercussions:

"There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year," McCain said during an interview Monday on an Arizona radio affiliate. "They have poisoned the well in what they've done and how they've done it."

Um, two questions: Was there cooperation before this? Because I think I missed it. And "for the rest of the year"? Seriously? Was there a meeting, at which this time frame was agreed upon? Did they put Mr. Happy Fun Guy in charge of making that decision? Who's got the fly-on-the-wall stuff here?

My absolute favorite euphemism ever

... comes from Tom Schaller at fivethirtyeight.com, and it needed a perfect storm to come into being:

Those qualifiers aside, in 10 of the top 12 Senate race states, Democrats are in a better registration situation today than they were going into the 2004 elections. The two exceptions—Arkansas and Kentucky--are not particularly surprising, given that they include many of those 22 percent of the counties nationally where Obama underperformed relative to John Kerry in 2004.

I'm a great admirer of artfully constructed sentences, and this guy is my new hero. He takes the state of the economy in 2004, the state of the economy in 2008, George W. Bush's performance in his second term as president, John Kerry's appeal as a presidential candidate, and Barack Obama's appeal as a candidate running against John McCain and Sarah Palin, and somehow comes out of it with the new Some of my best friends are black. "I'm not racist; I just happen to live in a county where Obama underperformed relative to John Kerry in 2004!" That's exactly how I would say it. You know. If I were racist.