Daily Bafflements

• It’s not just congressional seats that are increasingly up for sale; judicial elections have also been flooded with cash. Judicial primary spending in North Carolina has broken a record at $1.3 million.

• What’s to blame for “The Unbearable Whiteness of Liberal Media,” asks Gabriel Arana at The American Prospect? The fact that most staff hires come through (frequently unpaid) internship programs is a pretty good place to start.

• Kevin Thomas’s book review, in comic form, provides a nice distillation of Phil Klay’s short story collection Redeployment.*

• Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel hinted over the weekend that the ban against transgender people serving in the military may be lifted, the AP reports. Meanwhile, Chelsea Manning, facing a 35-year prison sentence, “is seeking a counselor who specializes in gender issues and also wants to get hormone replacement therapy, which the military has said it does not provide.”

*Correction: this post previously referred to Klay’s book as a memoir, but it is in fact a collection of short stories. It has now been fixed; apologies for the error.