Sherry Chandler

Just got back from the polls. Not much going on here. All local races, though some hotly contested: sheriff, circuit clerk, county attorney, circuit judge. These races are important but probably not of much interest outside Bourbon County.

Yes, judges are elected in Kentucky. That doesn’t always seem like a bad thing. [Disclosure: I have a relative running for circuit judge in another district.] We have had some politically charged appointments to the state supreme court lately that don’t look much superior to an elected judge.

The judge’s race is supposed to be non-partisan but it is sometimes an open secret which way a candidate leans if you pay attention. For example, in our race, one candidate promises not to legislate from the bench so I figure that’s code for right wing, a second was campaign worker for a very right-wing state senator. We have three candidates. Top two run off in the fall.

The hottest race in Kentucky is the Congressional primary down in Louisville where Democratic candidates will run against the incumbant Republican Ann Northrop. Our own Democratic congressman, the only one in the state, is unopposed in the primary.

Anyway, this being election day here, seemed like a good time to point out that Survey USA now finds only three states – Idaho, Utah and Wyoming – in which Bush has a favorable rating. Kentucky gives him a 34% approval. And MyDD has put together this county by county map from Survey USA data that shows an interesting pattern:

In addition to that big streak of red up through the middle of the country, it looks to me as though there is an enclave of support down in eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia — it’s a little hard to figure out exactly where state lines are — and another that looks like Southern Ohio and Indiana. You can click the map to go to the full-size version and a map of state borders that makes it easier to orient yourself.

Thanks to Taegan Goddard for the links.

Every day I get a newsletter from the New York Times that lists “Today’s Headlines” on a variety of topics, with links to the articles. Here are today’s headlines under the category “Arts:”

ARTS

Paris’s Jewel-like Orangerie, Home to Monet’s Waterlilies, Reopens, Polished and Renovated
By ALAN RIDING
At first glance, the Orangerie, standing across from the Musée du Jeu de Paume, its near-identical twin, looks largely unchanged. Yet, not for the first time, it has undergone a radical makeover.

‘Da Vinci Code’: The Mystery of the Missing Screenings
By SHARON WAXMAN
Sony’s “Da Vinci Code” will be released without first undergoing test screenings, to preserve a climate of mystery and excitement around the movie.

ABC Fills Out Its Lineup With Slate of New Shows
By BILL CARTER
The network has ordered 12 new scripted series, clearly searching for some shows that will be able to match its existing hits, like “Desperate Housewives,” “Lost” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Here is the headline that was not important enough to make the newsletter:

Stanley Kunitz, Poet Laureate, Dies at 100
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Stanley Kunitz was one of the most acclaimed and durable American poets of the last century.

We live in a world, my friends, where “Desperate Housewives” and the DaVinci Code previews are more important than the death of Stanley Kunitz. Which, whatever you might think of Mr. Kunitz’s work, strikes me as wrong. I take some comfort, however, in noting that the obit is #4 in the Times’s most e-mailed list. So perhaps the public cares if the headline chooser IT person does not.

Here is the obit, which begins:

Stanley Kunitz, who was one of the most acclaimed and durable American poets of the last century and who, at age 95, was named poet laureate of the United States, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 100 and also had a home in Provincetown, Mass.

From Allegre’s Diary at the Daily Kos:

I’m tired of the tears.
I’m tired of the chants.
I’m tired of the rallies and vigils and pleas for peace - for our children’s sake.
I’m tired of singing the same songs generation after generation after generation…

But I’m not going anywhere and now, neither are my children - third generation peace activists.

My husband & I took our children to the Code Pink Mothers Day peace vigil at the White House Saturday and Sunday, and this mother can’t think of a better way to celebrate - standing tall with other mothers and their kids demanding that once and for all, our leaders stop waging war in our name, using our children as cannon fodder.

From Nora Ephron’s Huffington Post blog:

I have never approved of Laura Bush, for all the obvious reasons, but I have to admit that I’m intrigued by her in one respect: she’s truly a mystery as a mother. I never like to judge people motherhood-wise, because you never know. But it’s hard to think of any First Lady who has been seen less often with her children. Is she deliberately ruling out the promiscuous photo opportunities? Does she have a political position about her daughters’ right to privacy? Or is it just that they never call, they never write, they never visit, as the old joke goes.

Anyway, on Mother’s Day, I decided to watch Laura Bush on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. She told George she doesn’t believe her husband’s low approval ratings. She claimed that the press enjoys printing the bad news. She said she wasn’t seeing either of her daughters on Mother’s Day. No surprise in any of that.

From AFP:

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Canadian Melissa Vatkin has joined thousands of couples flocking to the United States to cash in on the disputed luxury of being able to dictate the sex of their next baby.

Parents from around the world are forking out around 19,000 dollars for a groundbreaking gender selection treatment offered by only a handful of US clinics but banned in most countries.

The high-tech method of resolving the ancient question of “Would we prefer a boy or a girl?” has raised ethical concerns and fears that it could worsen an already worrying gender imbalance plaguing countries such as China and India.

But for couples like the Vatkins, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, which proponents boast gives parents a 99 percent certainty of delivering a baby of the sex of their choice, the procedure is a godsend.

…

Other couples come from much further afield. More than 50 percent of the couples that come to Steinberg for help are from outside the United States.

Would-be parents from territories such as China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Germany, Britain and Canada are flocking to Steinberg’s Los Angeles and Arizona clinics.

“They come from everywhere that it’s banned by law,” Steinberg said. “But in the United States we really guard and cherish reproductive choice and we are very reticent to allow the government to impinge on that.”

…

He stresses that his clients mostly opt to keep fertilised eggs in his eggbank rather than discard them. He said the technique was more humane than the current trend of aborting foetuses or dumping female babies in India and China.