Interesting article on Ned Lamont

[riona]

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060501&s=zengerle050106
(New Republic, Jason Zengerle)

snip

"But Lamont's campaign against Lieberman has now brought him face-to-face with the radical fringe. And, as he continued to talk in his campaign office, he sounded very much like a prude who had wandered into a swingers' club and was still trying to convince himself that he was comfortable with what he'd seen. "I was not a big blog guy," Lamont said, admitting that he tended to get most of his news from the "mainstreet" media. "But I've looked at them a lot more in the last 60 days than I did in the previous 52 years." Then, there are the people Lamont has met on the campaign trail who have exposed him to issues to which he'd previously not given much thought. "Oh boy, I get a lot of questions about media concentration," he said with a sigh. "Yeah, 'GE owns NBC or Murdoch owns Fox and DirecTV,' you know. I'm in media so I'm supposed to be more outraged by that than I probably am." And, of course, he has been feeling some pressure to stake out more extreme positions than those with which he's comfortable. He recalled a recent campaign appearance at the University of Connecticut, during which a student asked him whether he supported impeaching President Bush for war crimes. "Gee, I was thinking maybe we'd censure him for fisa," Lamont said.

Like many of his supporters, Lamont has tried to turn his disagreement with Lieberman about the war--which, according to a February poll, is opposed by 61 percent of Connecticut residents--into a broader indictment of Lieberman's party disloyalty. "I doubt that anybody will call me 'George Bush's favorite Democrat,'" Lamont typically says on the stump, going on to declare that, if he wins, "You're not losing a senator, you're gaining a Democrat." But, when pressed on the issue of what exactly makes Lieberman such a bad Democrat, Lamont doesn't seem to have the heart to argue the case too forcefully. "He supported the energy bill," Lamont said, "and it was Senator Lieberman who, on 'Meet the Press,' said, 'Of course the federal government has got to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case.'" But, soon, Lamont circled back to the war. "I'd say Senator Lieberman has been all Iraq, all the time," he continued. "So it's not necessarily a question of being wrong on these issues, it's just sort of being silent."

[Capn Sunshine]

1. "Radical fringe"

That's code for anyone who knows how one of them infernal devil box computers works.

[The Magistrate]

2. That Lets Me Out, Then, Captain

My understanding of even the on-off switch is pretty hazy, and beyond that, is like an old map with blank spaces marked "Here be Dragonnes"....