I'm not as worked up about '06 as I might be because there's not a snowball's chance in hell my congressional district could go Republican.

McDermott's worst finish in his House seat in the last ten years was 2000, when the Green candidate rolled up 20% of the vote (best showing by a Green in a federal election ever). Since then he's faced the same Republican nutjob twice and thumped her soundly.

I guess Cantwell's re-election to the Senate might be close, but right now I'm not expecting it to be.

It will be close until what McGavick did at Safeco comes out. When you lay off half the workforce and give yourself a massive pay raise, it just looks bad. When you life insurance and investment division gets spun off and left to die, only to show better profitability than the company it was thrown from, it starts looking even worse. And then there's the issue of Safeco cancelling insurance because they're not making enough off of the policies.

Cantwell should struggle to a 3-4% win. Hopefully the animus about the 2004 election will be sated with what happens next Tuesday.

I've seen holiday lights up outdoors in a couple places for a couple weeks -- and by holidays, I don't mean Halloween. Halloween stuff I started seeing in August.

We haven't had any of that around here, thankfully. The displays go up in the stores ridiculously early, but the places that aren't selling the stuff generally don't decorate for the upcoming holiday until the beginning of the month of.

When do they come down? If the lights come down at the end of January, Christmas lights up would be up 1/4 of the year.

I don't recall, all I know is they've never put them up this early before. Normally they do it around the same time the city starts putting their own decorations up in late November/December 1st.

If we could just get a Democratic majority Congress and a Democrat in the White House again, I'd love to kick McDermott out for a Green. Of course, a Green would caucus with the Dems, so it's not like I really need to wait to vote my heart on that one...

L&T had Christmas decorations for sale and where they were, they were playing Christmas songs. WRONG.

San Francisco is pretty sane about keeping its holidays on track. There's some xmas leakage into the Thanksgiving zone, but that's about it. You can't really start anything ahead of Halloween here because Halloween is such a big deal in The City.

L&T had Christmas decorations for sale and where they were, they were playing Christmas songs. WRONG.

Macy's has had the christmas stuff up for at least a month.

If you think I get cranky about the hoopla in the workplace around a holiday I generally find mildly amusing, just you wait until Christmas, where I get to throw in family obligations and in-laws on top of the overexposure and damned invasive people.

bon, what do you think of Slate's characterization of Alito? He looks extreme right pro-business, pro-law enforcement, pro-guns, anti-civil rights act, anti-abortion in this rundown to me.

I would suspect such a hysterical commentary by Emily Bazelon (who's a hack), and I'm a little bit surprised that it's from Lithwick. My read of Alito is that he's not an ideologue, and that rundown pretty much confuses the man with his decisions. Moreover, I find it funny that she thinks any decision of his rejected by the Court is automatically a bad one-- it's not like she agrees with most of the Court, anyway.

Take this for example:

and his ruling that broadened police search powers to include the right to strip-search a drug dealer's wife and 10-year-old daughter—although they were not mentioned in the search warrant.

Except, well, this was in dissent, so it didn't broaden much; and his ruling was based on the plain language of the warrant, which was a warrant to search the premises and all occupants therein. The fact that he didn't carve out a judicial exception for 10-year-olds doesn't make him a foaming law-and-order reactionary.

I had more to say but I need to get back to work. Anyway, she's taken a lot of license here in painting him as a total crazy person. All I see is a pretty restrained jurist.

Thanks, bon. That's a helpful perspective.

We need to set you up with a Non Politically Motivated Judicial Scorecard website.

bon, thanks for sharing your insight. You make me feel a lot better.