Lexington's notebook

THIS week's print column is about the politics of very large pickup trucks. The piece took Lexington to Texas, where next year's models of full-size pickups were launched by Ford, Dodge and the rest with test-drives on the plains outside Dallas, followed by a series of press conferences at the State Fair of Texas. I was a day too early for the public opening of the fair itself, and so missed out on such legendary specialities as deep-fried beer. But even without visitors the fair's truck zone was pretty impressive, though I did worry that a couple of the manufacturers were burying their marketing messages and could have expressed them more assertively (see pictures).

AS WAS predicted by local political bosses, Pennsylvania's tough voter-ID law was put on hold today. To the dismay of local conservative talk-show hosts, who were roaring on Lexington's hire-car radio about "Judge Chickenhawk" permitting the dead to vote in the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia, Judge Robert Simpson ordered that a new requirement to show a valid identity card with photograph and expiry date before voting should not take effect before the elections on November 6th, for fear that legitimate voters might not be able to secure the right ID cards in time.

LEXINGTON'S print column this week comes from Philadelphia, where your columnist was received with patience and kindness by student Democrats and Republicans, and responds by teasing them dreadfully. Here is the column:

AS THEY wake on November 6th, political-science students at Temple University in Philadelphia will receive e-mails reminding them that it is election day, via their department’s automated mailing list. Once out of bed, they will find student Democratic volunteers bustling about with iPads and smartphones, ready to tell them which is their polling station and to provide directions.

HELLO. This is a brief posting from your new Lexington columnist, to greet new readers and—perhaps—old acquaintances from previous stints as Charlemagne and Bagehot.

It has been a move at short notice following the tragic death of my predecessor, Peter David, who will be forever missed here at The Economist.

My opening column appears in the print edition this week though I have been in America for a couple of months, reporting on election campaigning and politics from North Carolina to Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Arizona among other states. More states beckon, more blogging to follow.

THE title and subtitle seem to say it all: "It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism" (Basic Books). But the anger that courses through this latest analysis of America's broken politics comes as a surprise. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of Brookings are highly respected analysts. Their earlier book on Congress ("The Broken Branch") became something of a classic. Now they seem to be close to despair. Coming from them, the claim that the American system is even worse than it looks deserves to be taken with the utmost seriousness.

The book's thesis is not unusual.

THE photographs of American soldiers showing off the dismembered body parts of their enemies in Afghanistan are shocking. Andrew Sullivan seems to believe that this is "what empire does":

At what point will we recognize that inserting ourselves into places like Afghanistan and Iraq will change us, has changed us, and will change us. Mercifully, this latest inhuman excrescence is not government policy, as at Abu Ghraib. But it exposes even more deeply the inherent failure and moral corruption of occupying Afghanistan and the need to withdraw sooner rather than later.

THE North Korean rocket that broke into pieces less than two minutes into its flight put me in mind of Rick Perry's presidential campaign. Newt Gingrich's reminds me of one of those NASA probes that heads off for the outer edges of the solar system and is never heard from again, apart from the faint occasional peep of an indecipherable radio signal. I suppose Mitt Romney's has to be the Saturn 5. It was incredibly powerful and expensive, and it got to the moon, but with the benefit of hindsight nobody can remember quite why the journey was made in the first place.