AddieStan

The quick and dirty How your blogstress hates to overdo her occassional "Sentence of the Week" and "Graf of Every Other (or So) Day" features, but this week has seen some excellent writing from some of your Webwench's favorite fellas. To wit, the very witty William Powers, whose editors at National Journal have seen the wisdom of expanding his porfolio from media-mavening to theorizing everything. For the maiden voyage of his new column, Off Message , Powers offers this gem: At every turn, strategy defeats candor. Superficiality trumps depth. Lincoln, schminkin. This is the 21st century, and it's all about winning, baby. Watch the political shows for a while, listen carefully to the operatives' patter, and Iraq doesn't feel like a war any more. It feels like a poker chip. And it gets better once he ties in some scary trends from Teenland.

Confluence Thanks to the inimitable Wonkette , your blogstress has discovered a fascinating blog called The Turnspit Daily , which appears to be the brainchild and house organ of one Josh Rhoderick. "The Turnspit Daily is a freethinking, progressive weblog focusing on American politics, religion, and their confluence," explains Mr. Rhoderick on his "About" page. Indeed it is, and indeed a great need for such a blog exists. In case you missed it, yesterday's Washington Post carried a sharp analysis of President Bush's religiosity by Alan Cooperman, who implies that the president's use of religious language does little to illuminate his actual beliefs, and "much about his faith remains opaque or open to interpretation." A must-read. Cooperman leaves open the possibility of shrewdness in the president's use of faith talk (a probability of which your blogstress wrote during the last election).