According to The Swamp, John Edwards will announce on Friday, December 29. A bit late for the holiday season, but agreeably soon all the same.

Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson suffered some sort of medical emergency this afternoon; no word on what it was (a spokesman has denied that it was a stroke, as was widely reported earlier), but as of about 5:30 this morning, he was still in surgery.

The big-picture potential for this, of course, is the Democratic majority: if Johnson's incapable of serving come January, the Republican governor of South Dakota can appoint any replacement he likes; the appointment of a Republican would could give control of the Senate back to the Republicans.

When I first saw the stories this afternoon, my gut reaction to the Democratic-majority talk was discomfort: the man's suffered some sort of medical calamity, his life may be in danger, and within the first three sentences of every story is a mention of the fact that his incapacitation could hurt the balance of the Senate? But - as one might conclude from the fact that I'm writing about it now - I got over that. I wish him well, and I hope he gets better, in the same way that I'd hope that anyone who suffered a medical calamity got better (even a Republican).¹ But I think I'll be pulling for Johnson a bit harder than I'd be pulling for most other people. Because while his incapacitation (or worse) would be terrible for him and his family, it has the potential to be disastrous for the Democratic party.

Now, granted, even in the event of Republican control of the Senate, we're probably not talking catastrophe: the House would remain a solid buffer to GOP malfeasance. But the Senate, all by itself, has the potential to do serious harm (anyone else fake-coughing Sam Alito's name right now?). Suppose, God forbid, that John Paul Stevens suffered some sort of medical disaster. The difference between that happening while the Senate is controlled by the Democrats and that happening while the Senate is controlled by the Republicans could be the difference between Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy (or, perish the thought, David Souter).

There's a good chance that won't become an issue, of course. And there's even a very good chance that the Senate could spend the next two years as a Republican body and not have all too negative a net effect. But the potential exists that a Republican Senate could have a drastically negative effect. And for that reason, the fact that Tim Johnson's hospitalization could jeopardize the Democratic majority is probably bigger news, in the long run, than the fact of Tim Johnson's hospitalization all by itself. Hence this post.

Sorry, Senator. Get well soon.

1 - Okay, most Republicans.

Sam Brownback thinks there's "room in the [Republican] party" for pro-gay-rights candidates. Which shocked me, until I read the next paragraph, and realized that he said it in response to a question about Mitt Romney. Ouch. (I think the rough analogy on my side of the aisle would be if Evan Bayh, in response to a question about Joe Biden, told a reporter there's room in the Democratic party for racists.)

(And for the record, I don't think Joe Biden's a racist, any more than I think Mitt Romney is pro-gay-rights.)

Via Last Call comes this exceedingly amusing revelation from Katrina vanden Heuvel:

Gore's global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, has been a triumph for the issue itself and Gore's reputation. It has been short-listed for the Oscar's documentary category, as it should be. But wait, there's more. Also on the short list is a dark horse candidate, An Unreasonable Man, a documentary about the political life of (natch) Ralph Nader.

So here we are six years later faced with the potential of another Gore v Nader race. Will Nader siphon off enough votes to cost Gore yet another victory? Given the makeup of the 5,830 Academy voters, largely older and significantly Jewish, will Florida be the deciding battleground?

This is fantastic. If An Inconvenient Truth ends up finishing a close second to Jesus Camp, and An Unreasonable Man had enough votes to make the difference, one has to imagine the odds are good that Al Gore will literally have Ralph Nader killed.

According to a poll CNN released this morning, fully 62% of the country believes "America is ready" for a black president. And a solid 60% say the same about a female president.

Now if only they'd asked how many of those people were lying....

(And in my final catch-up post of the day, a Last Call-style Shot and Chaser that I jotted down a week and a half ago.)

Shot: "There’s one thing I’m not going to do: I’m not going to pull the troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete." -- President Bush, November 30, 2006.

Chaser: "[Mission accomplished.]" -- President Bush, May 1, 2003.


Zing!

The New York Times Book Review has named its 100 Notable and 10 Best of the year. If you haven't seen the lists already (this post was actually timely when I wrote it two weeks ago...), they're always worth a look.

(Note: this is way out of date, but I wanted to put it up anyway.) A week and a half ago, before Silvestre Reyes was announced as HPSCI chair, there was a mini-groundswell of support within the blogosphere – TPM, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly, David Corn at The Nation, and Joe Conason at Salon, et al – for a low-ranking New Jersey Democrat named Rush Holt. And that groundswell pleased me.

When it became clear (in mid-November) that Alcee Hastings wasn’t going to get the chairmanship, Rush Holt was my first thought. He's smart, he's well-liked, and he's got the background (the man's literally a nuclear physicist) to be very effective. But I was all the same surprised to see him get so much support among the lefty muckety-mucks. Because my second thought – the one that came right after "Hey, Holt would be good for that" – was "Who am I kidding? I'm not even sure the leadership knows who Holt is."

As it turned out, the political stickiness of sidestepping the CBC would have made it very difficult for Pelosi to tap Rush Holt even if she'd wanted to. I understand that, and I have no problem with Reyes; I'm sure he'll do a fine job. But I wanted to note for the record that I think Holt would have been the right choice. And apparently, I'm not alone in that.

If Jerry Bruckheimer did shuttle launches. (Photo by AP's Nigel Cook; a few other nice pictures are available at NASA's Kennedy Media Gallery.)

From a cheery article about the recent strong performance of wages relative to inflation:

For now, though, with the number of unemployed Americans actively seeking work at a five-year low, help-wanted signs are proliferating again and many businesses are having a harder time finding employees.

That means even lower-wage workers like Mercedes Herrera, an immigrant from Mexico who cleans at San Felipe Plaza, a high-rise office building in Houston, are enjoying more leverage with their employers. Last month, Ms. Herrera’s union, the Service Employees International Union, settled a monthlong strike and secured raises of more than $2 an hour over the next two years for some 5,300 janitors in Houston.

The pay of Ms. Herrera, a 37-year-old mother of four, will increase to $6.25 an hour on Jan. 1, from $5.65 now. "It’s going to be a big difference in my personal finances," she said, speaking through a translator. With the extra money, she said, she hoped she would no longer have to ask for food from churches.

Jesus Christ. That's the saddest thing I've read in a week. "And what are you planning to use your raise for, Area Woman?" "Oh, you know... a small second home, a big-screen TV, maybe play the market a little. Oh, and I was thinking I might finally be able to afford food."

$6.25 x 2,080 hours: $13,000.
2006 federal poverty guideline for a family of five: $23,400.
Ms. Herrera's increased salary as a percentage of the federal poverty level: 55%.

Now that's a strong economy.

"The tobacco industry: proudly seeming a little sillier every time you read something about us."

Remembering a murdered New Orleanian, with a little help from Edna St. Vincent Millay. Well worth a read.

(The full essay is after the jump, for those without TimesSelect access.)

Taken by the Tide
By BILLY SOTHERN.
Published: January 10, 2006

In one 24-hour period last week in New Orleans, now a small city of 200,000, six people were murdered. Last year's total of 161 murders probably made New Orleans the deadliest city in the United States by a significant margin. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the violence touched my life directly.

Last Thursday morning I received a call from my friend Kittee. ''I have awful news,'' she said, and then, very quickly: ''Someone broke into Paul and Helen's house. Helen was shot and killed. Paul was holding Baby Francis and was shot three times. He's still alive. Francis is O.K.''

Paul Gailiunas -- Dr. Paul, I call him -- had been my physician for several years at the Little Doctors Clinic, a health center for poor people that he founded in Treme, one of America's oldest black neighborhoods.

I had started to see Paul after my previous doctor mocked one of my colleagues about our work representing people on Louisiana's death row. When I met Paul through a friend, I asked him directly, ''Are you in favor of the death penalty?'' He responded, with a smile, ''Eh, I'm Canadian,'' clearly feeling that was answer enough.

And it was, coming from the founder of our local chapter of Food Not Bombs and the front man for the Troublemakers (a band whose songs celebrate Emma Goldman and the idea of universal health care) in such a lighthearted tone that it would scarcely have alienated the most ardent conservative.

Helen Hill was Paul's perfect match -- a kind and generous woman who made award-winning animated films and taught art and filmmaking to children, adults, anyone who was interested. She'd spent much of the last year restoring reels of 16-millimeter film on which she had drawn by hand, and which had been damaged when their house took four feet of water during Hurricane Katrina.

She had a new film under way, inspired by discarded hand-sewn dresses, made by an elderly New Orleanian, which Helen had found in the trash after the woman's death. The film interwove the story of the old woman and her dresses with Helen's own flood-torn life, which took her, Paul and Francis to Columbia, S.C. -- Helen's hometown, where she will be buried today -- for almost a year.

Helen had longed to return to New Orleans, despite Paul's concern that crime and potential hurricanes made it too dangerous for their family. So Helen campaigned, sending Paul's friends in New Orleans blank postcards, addressed to Paul, for us to write and mail to him. In mine, I pleaded with Paul -- ''We need you'' -- the way I do with anyone who is thinking about leaving, coming to, or even just visiting New Orleans. After what I am sure was a flood of similar cards, Paul relented.

I saw Paul and the baby a day after their return to the city, at a parade on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Francis had on a little railroad conductor's hat, a T-shirt depicting a cartoon love affair between red beans and rice (the New Orleans Monday lunch classic), and a little sign pinned to his back, in Helen's hand: ''New Orleans Native. I Got Back Yesterday!''

The day of the anniversary was solemn but optimistic. Everyone still had a can-do attitude. Paul, for one, could help make the city's people well and improve health care for the poor. Helen could make art depicting the city's life. Others could rebuild schools, demand better levees, reconstruct their homes. It still felt as if our grassroots efforts, along with some real help from a government finally forced to make good on its obligations, could create a more just, fair and safe city. It might have been naïve, but it really seemed possible.

After wandering this beautiful, falling-over city the afternoon after Helen's murder, forcing myself to remember why I love it here so much, I came back to my garden and picked flowers, those hardy few that had weathered the recent cold. I put them in a vase, wrote out the verses to Edna St. Vincent Millay's ''Dirge Without Music'' -- ''I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground / So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind'' -- and drove to the couple's house, which my wife and I had recently visited for Helen's open studio. On the steps leading up to their old shotgun house I set down the poem and the vase, just feet from where Paul had been found by the police, shot, bleeding, holding his baby.

On the way home, I stopped at my neighborhood bar to try to eat something. A picture of Paul and Helen, followed by one of the baby, appeared on the television in the corner. Oh, my God. The bartender was kind. She asked me whether I knew them, and talked to me about her fears living with her new baby in a city with no functional schools, no real plan for redevelopment, and spotty or nonexistent basic services. The TV news switched to a weather report: torrential downpours were expected to dump half a foot of rain overnight.

I drove home in the twilight and arrived uneasy and restless. Remembering the coming rain, I resolved to make myself useful to my block by digging out a sewer so backed up that the street -- on high ground by New Orleans standards -- floods at even the hint of rain. I had done this many times before, having realized that my innumerable calls to the city were in vain.

I pried up the 100-pound cast iron cover with a shovel and then shimmied it from side to side until I had the two-by-four sewer open. It was full to the top with debris. I shoveled out the leaves, dirt, Popeye's cups and other garbage until the small brick rectangle was as clean as it was a century ago, when New Orleans first created this drainage system.

Then I set to work on clearing the cylindrical drain -- about as wide as a hubcap, at the bottom corner of the cleaned-out basin -- so that the rain could find its way into the city's sewers, away from our houses, cars and belongings. I got down with a small shovel and burrowed through the muck until it seemed to open at the other side. Reaching in, though, I could feel that beyond the drain lay more dirt and leaves, packed hard.

Indeed, it became clear to me that the whole sewer line running beneath the street was solid with waste, impenetrable to arms and shovels -- that my street would flood again that night. The problem, I realized, is bigger than me.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Billy Sothern, a lawyer, is the author of the forthcoming "Down in New Orleans: Reflections on a Drowned City."