AddieStan

The numbers: Dems in mainstream on trade & health care, but fail to reach young women AMTRAK 166 (SOMEWHERE AROUND MYSTIC, CONN)--Having spent the last nine hours on a train, I fear I am painfully unaware of what is going on in real time, and have been, sadly, unable to read my comrades in blogs. All of which conspired to soil my delicate hands with actual newsprint. Trees ’n’ trade Today’s New York Times is chock full of interesting factoids, the grey lady having apparenly gone on a polling bender in recent days. Robin Toner’s A1 piece on the “great political divide” offers interesting graphs on the hardening of ideology along party lines, though the text of the piece notes that common ground exists on the need for health care reform. Trade and environmental protection, surprisingly, show up as potentially winning issues for Democrats in a poll the Times did with CBS News that was really intended to compare the postions taken by delegates to the Democratic National Con...

Just got by... AMTRAK 166 (AROUND EDISON, NJ)--Looks like we made it out of D.C. by a whisker. The conductor tells me that every other train scheduled after ours has been held up on account of the crime scene. Only moments out of Union Station on the 5:25 AM Northeast Regional, our train petered to a halt. There was some excitement among the crew, who were galloping up the center aisle of the head car, where I was the only passenger. “Holy sh*t!” someone exclaimed. Transmitted over a conductor’s walkie-talkie came the words, “We haven’t found any identification.” Too sleepy to do much worrying, I remained disinterested until the train started moving slowly, passing by a smashed-up car that had landed, improbably, by the side of the tracks, despite the lack of an intersecting road, or the fact that the tracks were lined by fences on either side. The vehicle had apparently gone airborne, tearing through a parking lot on the other side of the fence. Its doors were akimbo, its ...