Lightning Round: Election Day 2009 Might Just be More Significant than Election Day 2008.

• It still astonishes that we can wring our collective hands over $90 billion per year for health-care reform while no one bats an eye when $680 billion is appropriated for defense spending for the same period of time. Even more so that seemingly uncontroversial things like transportation spending is seen as one sieg heil from the goosestep but a worldwide network of military bases is just the price of freedom.
• While Hoffmania will undoubtedly impact how the GOP handles primaries in the future, Jay Cost points out that the situation in NY-23 is sui generis because New York already has a strong conservative party presence that facilitated a challenge to the GOP's candidate, who also suffered from being handpicked by the state party rather than going through a primary.
• Posted without comment: "Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say. The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk."
• Remainders: When it comes to invoking the state-secrets privilege, Obama channels Bush; clearly the media is ignoring the national implications of the race in CA-10; it's a mystery why world industrial output avoided falling into the abyss earlier this year; and I'd like to see this poll of Southern approval of Bush vs. Obama broken down by race.

--Mori Dinauer