Election day

(Via Dzyd Dennis)

Ed Park is a Democrat, Part II

According to HTML Giant, Small Beer Press is having a sale to benefit the Obama campaign.

Possibly, this is moot. Obama is way up and has lots of money. And the election is next week. And. And. And.

But you might as well do it because the books are all also on sale. For $264 you can have hardcover copies of everything they have published.

For $78, you can have everything they published in 2008.

SBP titles include Kelly Link's books and the anthology Trampoline, which contains a story by yours truly.

Call it courage

Dzyd Ta-Nehisi on Obama's grandparents, Frederick Douglass and Helen Pitts, and more.

Deconstructing Barry

Via Ta-Nehisi:

There has been speculation about this which I've ignored, no doubt because there are enough policy reasons to oppose Barack Obama and I don't want to feed into what sounds, at first blush, like Vince Fosteresque paranoia. But I've finally read Jack Cashill's lengthy analysis in The American Thinker. It is thorough, thoughtful, and alarming -- particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama's memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers' memoir.

There is nothing in Obama's scant paper trail prior to 1995 that would suggest something as stylish and penetrating as, at times, Dreams from My Father is. And when Obama speaks extemporaneously, one doesn't hear the same voice one encounters in the book. Now maybe Obama has a backlog of writing fom Columbia or Harvard that signal great literary promise, but he not only hasn't shared it, he's assiduously hidden traces of it. And, to be sure, writing is different from speaking -- in fairness, some of Obama's off-the-cuff bumbling when he speaks is certainly due to the rigors of the campaign which would cause even the most gifted communicator to faulter from time to time. But it's not unreasonable to expect more similarity between Obama the writer and Obama the orator. —National Review Online

(The "in fairness" is a nice touch.)