A new Poynter Institute piece on NY Post cartoonist Sean Delonas's February 18 offering--which may or may not have depicted Barack Obama as a dead chimp--includes a semi-exoneration from the excellent cartoonist Ted Rall:

Rall, who is familiar with Delonas' work, said he doesn't believe the cartoonist was saying anything about Obama.

Yesterday's Globe "Names" column included a nugget re: Gwen Ifill's new book, The Breakthrough, on the new generation of black politicians. After calling the flap over Ifill's role as presidential-debate moderator overblown, "Names" proceeded to pluck one--and only one--detail from Ifill's text:

One tidbit: Recalling the controversy over Patrick's decision to replace Mitt Romney's Ford Crown Vic with a new Cadillac DeVille DTS, the governor's wife, Diane, takes issue with the Boston Herald for calling the car "tricked-out."

In an LA Times article that was reprinted in today's Globe, reporter Richard Fausset speculates on the implications of the use of "ain't" by Anh Cao, a Vietnamese-American challenger to Congressman William Jefferson, who's black:

Anh "Joseph" Cao, who hopes to be the first Vietnamese American elected to Congress, was helping a TV interviewer with the pronunciation of his name It's not "cow" but "gow," he explained recently, with a hard G.

I'm loathe to pose this question, since race is always an incendiary subject, and the alleged concern about Boston's alleged racism that Kevin Garnett was erroneously saddled with upon joining the Celtics has been justifiably forgotten. But I'll do it anyway:

Why do white players seem to bring out the worst in Garnett?

I have a running argument with a friend about which anti-Obama attacks are racist. For example, I thought the McCain camp's Obama-disrespects-Palin ad played on toxic racist sentiments involving black men and white women. My friend didn't see it.

So I'd be interested to hear what readers think of Fox News's coverage of pro-Obama excitement in Kenya, his father's country of birth.

Today on Salon, Gary Kamiya makes a convincing connection between John McCain's new win-at-all-costs strategy and the approach Barry Goldwater used during the final days of his '64 run against Lyndon Johnson:

In fall 1964, Barry Goldwater was tanking in the polls, hammered by the media and by his Democratic opponent, Lyndon Johnson, as a radical who might start a nuclear war and would threaten cherished social programs like Social Security.