In These Times has an intereresting interview with Ian MacKaye, the former frontman for Fugazi and Minor Threat. In the interview he discusses political activism and fatherhood.

I don’t want to appear too cynical, but when I first saw the ‘Yes We Can’ rock video that Will.I.Am made, my first response was ‘Wow, finally a politician is making ads that are as good as Nike’s.’

-Naomi Klein

Profiles: Outside Agitator: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker.

But what I will always remember is as I was leaving that party in 2003, I was approached by another guest, an established author. He asked about the man I had been talking to. Sheepishly he told me he didn’t know that Obama was a guest at the party, and had asked him to fetch him a drink. In less than six years, Obama has gone from being mistaken for a waiter among the New York media elite, to the president-elect.

WSJ.com: Before He Was President, Mistaken for a Waiter: a 2003 Obama Meeting

logging a 10% victory over McCain in George W. Bush’s home state of Texas.

The results of the Weekly Reader Presidential Election Poll are in, and Barack Obama won the poll of US K-12 students. One interesting tidbit is that Obama won the great state of Texas by a ten percent margin over McCain, which may point to a profound political shift here in the years to come.

Joshua Marshall shares an account of the start of Talking Points Memo on Alternet. I run hot and cold about the site, but it’s certainly one of the best resources online for understanding political news. One thing I have wondered about is its expansion from a blog to a broader political news site, which Marshall says was necessary in order to get the ad revenue to support a news operation.

As I said, raze the Republican Party to the ground. Plough it under. Scatter salt in the furrows so it can never grow back.

We need another, very different opposition party to face the Democrats. We need it now.

- Brad DeLong, “Grasping Reality with Both Hands”

I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them.

-Naomi Wolf

The Battle Plan II: Sarah “Evita” Palin, the Muse of the Coming Police State

perspctv has been sitting in an open tab for days, and I thought I should blog it before closing the window. It’s an interesting series of visualizations that show, among other things, the relative number of mentions of McCain and Obama on Twitter.

“Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity,”

– Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland at TheHill.com