"I am as troubled by the use of the word 'woman' to describe the 18-year-old object, briefly, of a 53-year-old’s affections..."

"... as I am by the use of the word 'lover' to describe my 18-year-old self, in the context of that relationship."

Writes the 59-year-old Joyce Maynard on the occasion of a documentary movie about the now-dead J.D. Salinger.

IN THE COMMENTS: T J Sawyer said:

"His was a seduction played out with words and ideas..."

Sounds like Maynard is making a strong case for withdrawing the voting privilege from 18-year-olds. Or at least the distaff portion.

(Do I need to explicitly mention 2008 and 2012?)

Mid-recount, Prosser's lead has gone from 7,316 to 13,735.

525 of 3,602 precincts have finished their work. Maybe the slower-counting precincts will trend toward Kloppenburg, but it looks pretty hopeless.

ADDED: Actually, if Prosser picked up 6,419 in the first 525 precincts, there are perhaps 26,000 votes that could be netted by one candidate or the other in the remaining precincts. If there are more Kloppenburg-leaning counties that haven't finished yet, why couldn't she win? Prosser supporters should not get complacent. Pay attention! [ADDED: Most likely, the increased margin after counting only about 1/7 of the votes is purely a result of Prosser-leaning precincts having finished counting at this point. The precincts that are reporting on the recount may be coming up with exactly the same totals they had the first time.]

IN THE COMMENTS: Larry J says:

Of course the precincts that trend towards Kloppenburg will be slow to report. They want to see how many votes they have to manufacture. It's a very old tactic that has been proven quite effective (e.g. Kennedy, Franken).

And traditionalguy said:

Or the recount is revealing the vote packing fraud practiced by the Kloppenburgers that aimed to win by just enough against a known count for Prosser. But the "mistake" of leaving out a city's report from the totals skewed the target that the Kloppenberger vote packers had to aim for. Damn those cheating Republicans.

That made me realize that I was assuming Prosser's net gain was the result of finding previously uncounted votes. But it could just as well be the result of Kloppenburg losing votes. The linked article is minimal, but it does say the recounters haven't found any "major anomalies."

MORE: Commenter Dual Freq gives us the cite to get to the running totals, so we can see how the new counts in each precinct. When you do that, you can see that nothing dramatic has happened. Even though the margin at this point is 6,419 more than the original margin for the whole state, the comparison of the previous totals in the recounted precincts reveals that Prosser has only netted 33 votes so far in the recount. That is, the original count was pretty accurate.

MORE IN THE COMMENTS: Dual Freq says:

Looking closer at the totals from the GAB's spreadsheet, the differences are mostly 0, 1, 2 or 3 votes in each ward. Except two wards. Prosser lost 4 and Kloppenburg gained for for a net loss of 8 votes in Bailey's Harbor Ward 1&2 in Door county. Prosser also netted 15 in Eau Pleine Ward 1 in Portage County when Prosser gained 7 and Kloppenburg lost 8 from the original totals. That's a huge error there because there were only 339 votes in that ward.

T J Sawyer saYS:

The title of the post reads like a report from the MSM. It's a good thing we have DualFreq on the job!

Yes! Many thanks to Dual Freq!

"Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary, said on Sunday that there was so far no evidence of a wider terrorist plot..."

Hmmm. But the administration also didn't see the warnings — relayed the suspect's own father — that Abdulmutallab was a threat. It's the administration's duty to see the "dots" and connect them. Now, I know they are mopping up after a failure, and there is reason to want to portray the attack as coming out of the blue and unconnected to anything that should have been the subject of close monitoring, but — damn — I hope they are doing a better job than they look like they are doing. And if they don't look like they've been doing a good job, then they aren't even doing a good job of mopping up after their failure.

Abdulmutallab should not have been on that plane!

IN THE COMMENTS: T J Sawyer said:

"The System Worked!"

Nappie, you're doing a heck of a job.