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David Domke is Professor of Communication and Head of Journalism at the University of Washington. Kevin Coe is a doctoral candidate in Speech Communication at the University of Illinois. They are authors of the The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. To learn more about the book check out their handy website here, to read more posts by them click here.  In the post below they bid farewell to Mike Huckabee.

On Tuesday, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee finally gave up on his bid to win the GOP presidential nomination. Let us be among the first to say good riddance. (more…)

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I'm doing a sort of one man press junket right now (although Michelle Pfeiffer will be doing it as well tomorrow). Lots of interviews (MTV Movies, Time Out NY, NY Daily News, Time Magazine and the LA Times today, along with a "round table" interview with about ten journalists and a photo shoot (thank heavens they had a make-up lady for the shoot, who made me look less like a giant panda around the eyes than I really do right now). Tomorrow is the NY Times syndicate and the NY Times, and the NY Post. Then I get on a plane and do it some more.

I'm brain dead, partly from being interviewed out and partly because travel to NY yesterday afternoon proved really problematic -- my flight was cancelled, and I didn't get in until after midnight, on a different airline, on a delayed flight flying via Milwaukee (and at that, I did better than most of the other people on the flight, who had to stay overnight in Minneapolis).

I also decided that the thing you most don't want to hear from a check-in person is what the lady at Midwest Airlines said to me when I showed her the Northwest slip saying they'd put me on MidWest, after I'd made a mad taxi ride from one airport to another. She looked down at it and said "You have got to be kidding!" The flight they'd put me on was oversold and had standby passengers.

But they got me on it somehow, and all was well. I just wish I wasn't so tired.

Regarding raccoons getting through catflaps: a few years back someone set up a computer with image-recognition software to stop their cat bringing in small animals (and incidentally test their image-recognition software). It also stopped a skunk getting in; it should work on raccoons too:

http://www.quantumpicture.com/Flo_Control/flo_control.htm

I don't think it would do any good, seeing that it's all based around the same magnetic cat-door that our raccoons have already figured out how to jimmy. It's very clever, though.

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And over here -- http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=news&id=11038 -- is a little of the Beowulf score.