Since when is an incumbent governor an outsider candidate? Since when is Kay Bailey Hutchison a moderate?

As much as it would make American politics easier to understand, this is not Massachusetts redux. This is Texas republicans voting in a primary for a federal government-hating, mainstream lunatic. This is news?

His memoir is like Tolstoy. It gives the spectacularly unsettling sense that world history is decided by an assortment of guys who are improvising, and may not be particularly good at it. Only, unlike in Tolstoy, there’s a lot of nausea.

I read Game Change this weekend and enjoyed it more than I should be admitting here. Still, the feeling I had after reading it was close to the one Ableson had about “On The Brink”. Except the nausea was all mine. Who the fuck is driving this thing?

Really fun.

And there is nothing going on that will markedly improve my income in the years to come. So my debt is bad.

But not all debt is created equal. Do journalists working the business pages need any background in economics? Do traders? Maybe they know something Krugman doesn’t.

What’s scandal-worthy is that there seems to be no similar progressive blogging machine on the other side.

It’s the inverse of the Bush/Kerry era, when the right wingers in the US just didn’t get the lefty blogging army, and founded sites like Pajamas Media that kind of missed the point. I used to think this said something profound about the respected ideologies, but now I just think the last decade was a good time to be in opposition, technologically speaking.

The UK’s Advertising Standards Agency today banned a proposed PETA ad featuring a notorious North Londoner who beat a child to death, saying it was exploitative. Which it is. But PETA’s advertising is often exploitative, so this is nothing new, and the fact that they would use the murder of a baby to further their cause really isn’t surprising. Which says something – I think it would be pretty surprising if just about any other international organisation found a good use for baby killing – so well done you for setting yourselves apart. But I digress.

The ad was to read:

Steven Barker: animal abuser, baby abuser, rapist. People who are violent towards animals rarely stop there.

So here’s the part I find hopeful: the way this is phrased, it actually seems to imply that animal abuse might be slightly less heinous than abusing babies and raping people. Not that I’m in the habit of ranking horrific acts over my lunch break, but it seems like progress for PETA to admit that animals might not come out tops in this particular trio.

Now if only they’d walk back their suggestion of milking women instead of cows…