;)
The Commentariat -- Jan. 18, 2013
My column in today's New York Times eXaminer is on Paul Krugman's takedown of Tom Friedman.
To find out how you can participate, CLICK ON THE IMAGE.President Obama in a Yahoo! op-ed: "Each January as we celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we are called not just to pause and reflect, but to act.... This Saturday, we're continuing that tradition with another National Day of Service. Michelle, the girls and I will be volunteering in our community, and we're asking all Americans to join us."
Michael Cooper & Dahlia Sussman of the New York Times: "The massacre of children at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., appears to be profoundly swaying Americans' views on guns, galvanizing the broadest support for stricter gun laws in about a decade, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.... The poll found that a majority of Americans -- 54 percent -- think gun control laws should be tightened, up markedly from a CBS News poll in April that found that only 39 percent backed stricter laws. The rise in support for stricter gun laws stretched across political lines, including an 18-point increase among Republicans. A majority of independents now back stricter gun laws." ...
Michael Cooper: "... as mayors from around the nation gathered [in Washington, D.C.,] on Thursday for the 81st winter meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors, many said they were heartened by President Obama's call for new laws to curb gun violence, which included several measures that the conference had sought for decades. Many said they planned to urge Congress to enact them."
... Dave Weigel of Slate: "Gun massacre trutherism isn't tied to election results. It bubbles over after every massacre.... The theories ... spread in part because of the confirmation bias of worried gun owners. And that's actually been egged on, multiple times, by the National Rifle Association.... The idea that the government is one short step away from a gun ban is actually integral to the lobby's pitch."
Susan Eisenhower in the Washington Post: "For the eight years that my grandfather, Dwight Eisenhower, was president of the United States, I had Secret Service protection.... These armed agents protected my sisters, brother and me from potential kidnappings or other targeted attacks.... Any thinking person has to be disgusted by the National Rifle Association ad ... suggesting that the president is an 'elitist hypocrite' because his children have the benefit of armed protection at school and the nation's children as a whole do not. This is absurd. The nation's children are not individually at risk the way the Obama children are.... The NRA's attack ad should be condemned for exacerbating the dangers faced by the president and his family...." ...
"The Dwindling Deficit." Paul Krugman: "Even without [taking specific action to reduce the deficit], however, the budget outlook for the next 10 years doesn't look at all alarming. Now, projections that run further into the future do suggest trouble, as an aging population and rising health care costs continue to push federal spending higher. But ... why, exactly, should we believe that it's necessary, or even possible, to decide right now how we will eventually address the budget issues of the 2030s?"
Navel-Gazing, GOP Edition
Rosalind Helderman & Ed O'Keefe of the Washington Post: "House Republicans are cloistered at a tony golf resort [in Williamsburg, Virginia,] for three days hoping to resurrect their battered political brand, as they prepare for what could be another damaging confrontation with President Obama over federal spending.... Although there was some urgency for a change, the consensus was that the change was about how to communicate, not about rethinking core policy positions." CW Trans.: "We are still greedy, misogynistic, sociopathic martinets, but we're looking at ways to Stockholm-Syndrome you into liking it."
The Vote No/Hope Yes Caucus. Ashley Parker of the New York Times: the Vote No/Hope Yes Caucus is "the small but significant number of Republican representatives who, on the recent legislation to head off the broad tax increases and spending cuts mandated by the so-called fiscal cliff, voted no while privately hoping -- and at times even lobbying -- in favor of the bill's passage, given the potential harmful economic consequences otherwise.... The Vote No/Hope Yes group is perhaps the purest embodiment of the uneasy relationship between politics and pragmatism in the nation's capital and a group whose very existence must be understood and dealt with as the Republican Party grapples with its future in the wake of the bruising 2012 elections."
Actually, They're All Wingers. Ed Kilgore: "I would object to the neat characterization of House GOPers as falling into three equivalent baskets of 'moderates, pragmatic conservatives, and hard-core conservatives.' ... Calling any House Republican in a competitive district a 'moderate' is both dangerous and wrong.... As for the 'pragmatic conservatives' (presumably led by John Boehner), exactly how much pragmatism can be attributed to the decision not to blow up the economy? ... The temptation to treat the two parties as composed of balanced groups of ideologues and 'pragmatists' or 'moderates' is at the very center of the false-equivalency meme.... There is an extremist ideology that unites most Republican pols...." ...
Charles Pierce. Paul "Ryan has a brand-new shiny idea that he's out in the yard playing with. It's called 'prioritization,' and it's the latest thing in zombie-eyed granny starving. By this theory, which is the brainchild of Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey, himself an economic extremist..., we hit the debt limit and then the government 'prioritizes' its spending, beginning with interest on the debt, because that's what most Americans are sweating in their shoes about, and then skipping right to veterans benefits, because cutting them would cause actual political problems for hacks like Toomey and Ryan.... It seems to me that the American people gave Ryan a 'crystal clear' indication what they thought of his ideas..., but that's just me.... It really is time to stop taking this guy seriously." ...
... UPI Update: "U.S. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said Republicans may back a short-term debt-ceiling increase -- a notion the White House immediately rejected.... White House spokesman Jay Carney rejected the notion of raising the $16.4 trillion debt ceiling in the short term, saying postponing Congress' responsibility would create drama in Washington that will hurt the U.S. economy." ...
... Steve Benen on the debt ceiling war: "It would probably be an overstatement to say Republicans are already surrendering, but let's just say they've taken the white flag off the shelf, even if they're not yet ready to wave it."
Jamelle Bouie, in the Washington Post: "On issues that don't obviously relate to the party's long-term survival, [Sen. Marco] Rubio [RTP-Fla.] is a conventional conservative, responding to a base that remains far to the right of the average American. To wit, Rubio's response to President Obama's gun safety measures -- which are modest in scope and broadly popular -- is nothing short of hysterical.... Republican lawmakers -- even so-called reformers -- must still respond to their supporters. And by and large, the GOP remains committed to the values of its right-wing base."
Here's why Republicans have become ever so self-aware. Henry Decker of the National Memo: "According to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, President Barack Obama's approval rating is near an all-time high, and the public is on his side in the upcoming debt ceiling debate. The poll finds Obama's approval rating at 55 percent, his highest level since November, 2009 (excluding a brief bump up to 56 percent after the president ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011) 61 percent view Obama as a strong leader -- his highest level in three years -- and 53 percent say they're optimistic about the policies he'll pursue in his second term. By contrast..., Congress has just a 19 percent approval rating; 37 percent approve of House Democrats, and 24 percent approve of House Republicans."
Jonathan Bernstein on the Separation of Powers That Isn't. "You won't hear it from House Republicans and other conservatives, who are talking impeachment over the prospect that Obama might use executive orders as part of his gun-safety initiatives (this notwithstanding that, by one count, Obama uses executive orders less frequently than most presidents), but executive orders save Congress from passing laws that would have to be far more detailed and complex than they currently are. Not only that: sometimes the easiest way to get a bill over the finish line is to leave the specifics up to the regulators over in the executive branch. So often the path of least resistance for Congress is to pass vague legislation and leave it to the executive branch to fill in the details."
Rigging the 2016 Presidential Election. Erik Loomis of Lawyers, Guns & Money: "Why this story isn't getting more attention, I don't know.... Rather than broaden their message to appeal to young and non-white voters, Republicans are looking to commit the greatest suppression of votes since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed.... It is entirely possible that a Democratic candidate could win 55% of the vote in 2016 and lose the election."
** "A Tale of Two Dead Girls & Notre Dame Football." Amanda Marcotte of Slate: "Lizzy Seeberg was a real person and she really did kill herself in 2011, at age 19, after accusing a football player of sexual assault." People harassed her, the campus police investigated her but not the accused, who -- once "investigated" after Seeberg's death, was immediately cleared. "Te'o's story has been all over the news today -- and with good reason. It's nuts. But what's also nuts is that the story of Lennay Kekua -- the dead girl who never lived -- is a bigger deal ... than the story of Lizzy Seeberg, whose real life ended in real tragedy.... Beautiful, selfless, perfect woman does not exist? Now that's a story. The horrors faced by women trying to find justice for sexual violence? Sorry, ladies, that's just boring old everyday life." ...
... ** Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post: "... evidence that the University of Notre Dame covers up for sexual predators on the football team in hopes of winning some games has been mostly ignored.... We know for sure that Notre Dame collaborated with at least one story, on Charlie Rose's CBS morning show, that told the phony boohoo tale after the school knew no such woman had ever walked the earth." ...
... Tim Egan: "The Internet is the cause of much of today's commitment-free, surface-only living; it's also the explanation for why someone could tumble head-over-heels for a pixelated cipher. Online dating was only the start of what led us down this road."
Josh Gerstein of Politico: "President Barack Obama's Jobs Council hit a notable milestone on Thursday: one year without an official meeting. The 26-member panel is also set to expire at the end of the month.... Politico caused a stir last July by reporting that the panel had not convened officially for six months. The story noted some simmering tension between the slew of business executives on the board and a pair of labor leaders who are also members of the group. The report also said that some CEOs were reluctant to appear with Obama at the height of the presidential campaign...." CW: the less Obama talks to those scheming reprobates, the better.
"Les Insufferables." Nicholas Beaudrot of Donkeylicious: "There is plenty to mock in the Wall Street Journal's profile of some hypothetical households that will see tax increases.... A huge chunk of the tax increase on the fake single mom and fake single can be chalked up to the lapse of the payroll tax holiday [which Republicans demanded].... Perhaps the most laughable part ... is that all of these households realize a substantial portion of their income through taxable investment income.... Given the WSJ's insistence on including an absurdly large amount of investment income in their hypotheticals, it's quite possible that there are zero households that come close to matching these characteristics. They might as well be reporting on how the tax changes will affect Elvis Presley, JFK, and Sasquatch...." Via Jonathan Bernstein. CW: Here's some mockery, courtesy of Charles Pierce, which includes a comment from me.
News Ledes
New York Times: "C. Ray Nagin, the former mayor of this city who fulminated against the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina but became for many a symbol of the shortcomings of government himself, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Friday on 21 counts including conspiracy, bribery and money laundering." CW: presumed innocent, but, um, what a surprise.
** AP: "A federal appeals court on Friday upheld Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's contentious law stripping most public workers of nearly all of their collective bargaining rights in a decision hailed by Republicans but not undoing a state court ruling keeping much of the law from being in effect."
New York Times: "Gussie Moran, who as a ranked American tennis player in 1949 caused an international stir and gained worldwide fame for competing at Wimbledon wearing a short skirt and lace-trimmed underwear, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 89."
New York Times: "... some of the hundreds of workers who managed to escape the national gas field on the eastern edge of Algeria that had been stormed by Islamist militants two days before" told "chilling tales" of their ordeal. "The gunmen, fighters with a group called Al Mulathameen, said they were acting to avenge the French intervention in nearby Mali, Algerian officials said. But there were indications that the attack had been planned long before the French military began its offensive to recapture the northern half of that country from Islamist insurgents." ...
... New York Times: "Britain said on Friday that an Algerian military operation against kidnappers in the Sahara was not over and the fate of some captives remained unclear a day after Algeria mounted an assault on heavily armed fighters holding American and other hostages at a remote gas field facility." ...
... Reuters: "Hundreds of workers from international oil companies have been evacuated from Algeria on Thursday and many more will follow, BP said on Friday following the al-Qaeda-linked attack on a major gas facility."
New York Times: "The discovery by American intelligence agencies that North Korea is moving mobile missile launchers around the country, some carrying a new generation of powerful rocket, has spurred new assessments of the intentions of the country's young new leader, Kim Jong-un, who has talked about economic change but appears to be accelerating the country's ability to attack American allies or forces in Asia, and ultimately to strike across the Pacific."
New York Times: "In a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey, Lance Armstrong admitted to using banned substances but did not say how he did it or who helped him."
AP: "The former Century 16 [in Aurora, Colorado], now renovated and renamed the Century Aurora, opened its doors to victims of the July 20 attack on Thursday night with a somber remembrance ceremony and a special showing of 'The Hobbit.'"
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Reader Comments (15)
Re the death of Pauline Phillips. John Prine said everything that needs to be said in the early 70s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF8S5XB-eYs
@Marie: Actually, there is at least one person who may come close to the WSJ profile-----me. Lacking any kind of pension, my income now that I have retired is about 80% investment income, and I will pay the increased taxes cheerfully.
Neil Young's song Powderfinger seems particularly relevant as we yet again debate the role of firearms in civil society, and more broadly our obscene violent domestic culture and foreign policy.
***
Shelter me from the powder and the finger
Cover me with the thought that pulled the trigger
Think of me as one you'd never figured
Would fade away so young
With so much left undone
***
not much else need be said
CW: Portions of this comment were removed for copyright infringement; I've left enough that I think you get the gist of the lyrics. Besides, the linked video tells the whole story.
Re: Egan. Much of what he said about Manti Te'o may or may not be true about Manti (when you're reading comments made from a distance about a story that has multiple versions, it's a little hard to tell) but Egan does take a swing at some of the issues of our "truthiness" world, exacerbated but hardly invented by the modern media.
Sent a version of this off to the NYTimes on the subject last night.
"Back in the long ago when Republicans were thoughtful enough to make occasional sense, Daniel Boorstin penned a book (without the aid of a computer keyboard, I'd wager) called "The Image" in which he described the degree to which American life had come to revolve around what he called "pseudoevents."
Tho' as I remember he did not equate his pseudoevents with lies, I thought of Boorstin's little book often during the last Presidential campaign. In a culture that has long encouraged the substitution of the sizzle for the steak, the appearance for the reality, it was no great leap to mount an entire campaign on a succession of vaguely plausible untruths. When digital-age journalism does little but copy and paste, lying has little fear of discovery. And in a culture where lying is so common it is almost accepted, its occasional exposure fails to shock.
That being true of something as consequential as a Presidential election, how little does it matter when the lie is simply another prop to trivial celebrity?
After all, we lie all the time. To sell things to one another, to entertain, we deliberately blur the lines between reality and fantasy and tho' we say we do not expect anyone to believe the lies television concocts, even when we're not told we're watching "reality" TV we do expect the audience to believe, just a little.
In fact, lying is so common in our culture, we've extended that blurred line between what is real and what is not to the citadel of what everyone used to agree was all about facts. For commercial and political purposes even science has been subverted. We know some scientists skew data and fake research, so we doubt them all. Global warming? It's a pack of lies. Chevron says so. Since it's all lies anyway, one truthiness is a good as another. Whole industries make a good living sowing this kind of doubt.
Trained from youth that the whole thing we call life is just made up, that all is fiction, why shouldn't a boy, himself part myth, make up his love life, too?"
And when he does, even when it seems a bastion of so called higher learning has gone along with the charade, why should we be surprised? Fact has long lost it luster.
A last thought: since seeing a little of the National Championship game, I'm wondering if Manti himself or maybe the whole Notre Dame team was real or just a set of icons on an imagined screen; they certainly played like they weren't really there.
BTW, CW, be assured the lengths to which you go are on all fronts appreciated.
@Ken Winkes: Strangely enough, there's a "meaning of life" lesson in the Te'o story, & it has something to do with the relationship between reality & fantasy. We all live in the real world AND we all fantasize, but I think the real-world expectation is still that "good people" do not let fantasies, whether harmless or malign, leak out into the real world. Ergo, I won't tell you Robert Redford adores me, Hillary Clinton constantly calls me for advice & this lemon I'm selling is a reliable little automobile. Mitt Romney lost the election because he (a) doesn't know that or (b) counted on the public not to care whether or not their president was a "good person."
Specifically re: the Te'o story, I think it is more about Notre Dame & football than it is about one player. At some point, universities are going to have to get back to their first purpose. I don't expect that point to come any time soon.
Marie
You’d never know they just got their asses kicked, would you?
Republicans are still acting like they are in charge and anyone who doesn’t go along with them are either stupid or traitors or both (although “stupid traitor” sounds like a pretty good definition of most of these malcontents and misanthropes).
Rand Paul, talking to the press about his recent junket to Israel (groundwork for his presidential run) sounds like he’s already in the White House. His statements are littered with proclamations like “…I don’t intend to send any more money borrowed from China to foreign countries” which, I suppose, means that he has his own personal foreign policy. Well he doesn’t know anything about history or senate rules, why should he have a better grasp on foreign affairs? But that’s the hitch, isn’t it?
Yesterday Marie and Ken both made excellent points on the problems we all face when one of our two major political parties is so fact-challenged as to disqualify them from any serious debates on issues of national importance. A connected and larger problem is that they are still given consideration and acknowledgement by the MSM and provided with 24/7 battle support by their own battery of shills and media outlets.
I suppose living in your own universe where the sycophants, droolers, and Wall Street enablers continually tell you how right you are makes breaking this cycle terribly difficult. But the delusions fostered and then relied upon as a basis for national policy have taken us far past the point of simply trying to challenge wingnut positions and propositions.
I recently read an article outlining the philosophical problems with disagreement. It was a fairly exhaustive affair as these things are wont to be, but the results of an admittedly outlandish thought experiment (as those things are often wont to be) caught my attention. The experiment involved two people of apparently equal observational skills and mental acuity sitting at a restaurant table. One asks the other to pass the water pitcher. The second person denies that there is any water pitcher on the table and holds to this contention even after a waiter stops by and asks if they need the pitcher refilled.
What to make of this?
After reviewing all the possible reasons for such a weird state of affairs, the author, who initially asked what it meant to “agree to disagree” concluded that there was no such problem here because one of the two parties was clearly mentally or observationally impaired, or delusional, to a degree that made agreement or disagreement a moot point.
So it is with the Republican Party. As one piece linked here this morning describes it, there are no “moderate” or “pragmatic” Republicans. They are ALL wingnuts. Unless they step up to the mic and admit that, yes, there is a pitcher of water on the table, none of them have anything of value to say. And to disagree with them simply means that they have a point worth considering.
They don’t. About almost anything.
And until the MSM starts pointing this out to the voting public, their schemes to steal all the elections from here to eternity have a very good chance of succeeding. Why? Because the wingnuts have convinced millions of voters that they shouldn't see that water pitcher either.
So to them it doesn’t matter if millions of other voters (a lot more) just told them their ideas stink and kicked them down the back stairs. To the wingers, it’s all the more reason to deny what’s in front of your eyes. Because to admit otherwise would upend your entire world. And Those People would win.
@Marie: I'm shocked you didn't pick this up: China just passed a law allowing parents to sue their children if they don't visit "often." How often is sufficient is up to the court to determine:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karin-kasdin/chinese-parents-sue-children-for-not-visiting-enough_b_2468526.html
Ken,
I remember the Boorstin book. I was a big fan of Boorstin's writing. Still am. His "The Discoverers" is a regular visitor to my night stand.
And while I'm still on the wingnut alternate reality kick, and since the name Pete Peterson has been bandied and batted about recently, I thought I'd pass this on. Marie may have already pointed this out but if so, I missed it.
Peterson Propaganda Curriculum
The Peter G. Peterson Foundation (G for Greed) has opened its pocket book and generously agreed to inculcate young minds across the land with Mr. Pete's very own ideas about economics and how Social Security is a no good Ponzi scheme and how not to trust anything liberals or progressives say.
The schtick here is that Peterson has given Columbia University several million dollars to produce a "research based" economics curriculum called, rightwingingly enough, "Understanding Fiscal Responsibility" none of which involves giving money to blah people or the poor or elderly or indigent. The goal is to insert this particularly insidious propaganda into 40,000 American high schools. Thousands of free packages have been distributed already. The goal is clear: infect the next generation with a warped world view and clear the way for bulldozing entitlement programs forever.
I wonder if this program will make kids wonder what will happen to them and their parents and children when they vote to kill Social Security and Medicare. Will the Peterson Foundation take care of them?
And unlike the pseudo events Boorstin writes about in "The Image", this kind of propaganda is the real thing. It's not designed to attract press attention but to mold the thinking of young people to conform to accepted wingnut economic ideology. Makes it much easier to rule if everyone agrees with you.
@Akhilleus.
Glad to hear some of the good ones like Boorstin are still remembered. On your Peterson reference a selection from a reply I made to one of last night's Krugman commenters:
"But more to the point is the way in which those who cannot or will not see (through the scam) are the victims of those who can see, but pretend they can't. I'm thinking of those in the monied class whose intent is to increase and keep their already lop-sided share of the nation's weal.
This is the group that finances the intellectually bankrupt think tanks--propaganda mills, really--like the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution and numerous so called tax policy research groups that always just happen to determine that no tax is a good tax and no rate too low or too regressive.
This group does know better, and unsurprisingly the policies they support all have the same effect: keep wages low, maximize corporate profits, privatize everything and shift as much of the tax burden that cannot be eliminated or avoided to wage earners and away from the rich.
It's a cynical and immoral scam but even when disguised it's easily recognized; all one has to do is look at who is financing its various faces. Pete Peterson, the hedge fund gazillionaire and now the libertarian CEO of Whole Foods, who was himself born wealthy and resents paying for his employees' health insurance.
Who in his right mind (ah, there's the rub, Akhilleus) could take them seriously?"
Sorry Marie,
I'll try to be more careful.
Ken,
In addition to the fake "think tanks", the scams, the hypocrisy, the greed, the misanthropy (at least towards anyone not rich, white, male, or wingnutty), and the election stealing, the right does several things quite well, indeed.
They have astounding reaction time and when they act, they act with zealotry and urgency, something I don't always feel on the left.
Several cases in point. Before the last inaugural, the powers on the right had marshaled their forces of obstruction and character assassination to go after the president and they kept it up, banging away at him (and us, and the rest of the country) for four long years, drumming up ever more outrageous slanders all along the way.
Hours after Romney had canceled the credit cards of his campaign workers, Republican apparatchiks and their Richie Rich enablers were hard at work trying to figure out where their dastardly schemes went wrong and dreaming up new electoral nightmares for Democratic and independent voters for the next big election: more election stealing, voter suppression, vote rigging, etc.
And now they're busy as demented bees trying to Gerrymander the Electoral College. They are indefatigable in their efforts to demean and degrade any who stand in their way. No argument is too way out, no lie too big, no action too unethical for these creeps.
But I'll give them this. They're out their working at it. The gun lobby wigged out and called all hands on deck when Obama set Joe Biden to the task of looking at even the most reasonable and moderate ideas for controlling gun violence.
They want entitlement programs gone and taxes on the wealthy diminished to the point of a joke? They move heaven and earth to make those things happen. And now Pete Peterson wants to be the guy lecturing high school students on "fiscal responsibility" Republican style. They want to stop any research or action on global warming? They question the very foundations of science itself right down to basic algebra.
Hatred, anger, and zealous attention to ideological victories small and large have prepared these people for immediate action.
I just don't feel that kind of urgent response from the middle or the left. On gun control, many feel that someone, somewhere will maybe do something, or maybe not. The right doesn't think like that. They act as if their mothers are being paraded onto a scaffold to be hung within the hour.
The left sometimes seems as if they're just watching a bad reality show.
Maybe I'm wrong on this, but I see motivation, movement, and implacability on the right on too many issues. And it doesn't make me feel any better that a lot of it comes from insane people (just the opposite).
Some Friday afternoon kvetching on my part.
The movement by statehouses to steal national elections is one of the most frightening things I have ever seen. The US Constitution leaves the method of apportioning electoral votes to individual states. Several states have successfully used gerrymandering to gain control of state legislatures. Nothing in the last election would indicate that Republicans will suddenly spontaneously develop any behavior that is not entirely self serving. They are attempting to hide (though poorly) in a rhetorical flourish of BS. See Rubio on immigration. In my view, the Republican Party, all of them, are desperately ignorant, racist, woman hating, oozing malignant slime. If we think national level politicians are ignorant, take away at least 30 IQ points and a pathological distaste for education then look to the statehouses.
The electorate has bought in wholeheartedly to drinking a beer with a potential politico, preferably on you knees in a tent while praying to the baby Jeebus, as a test for leadership. That is exactly the problem. I want to admire someone for their wisdom, intelligence and judgement - not their choice of alcoholic beverages. I have no desire to socialize with the President. I understand my utter irrelevancy as an individual, in the context of needlessly taking up a President's time. I guess the 24/7 culture of reality shows gives people the mistaken believe that they have the where-with-all to actually run the country in such a complex world.
If the 2014 elections at the State level do not have a healthy Democratic voter turnout, 2016 will be a nightmare. I have written to my Senator and Congressman about this - Although Feinstein is currently occupied with Kathryn Bigelow's latest movie, perhaps she can tear herself away for a moment.
@Marie
Well, at least the Charie Pierce column you linked to makes one laugh amonst all of this gloom: "...If Cantor were any more transparent, he could swallow a flashlight and you could use him for a Japanese lantern."
@Akhilleus. Fine Friday rant says Ken, who is among the many fortunate Reality Chex commenters not limited to a mere 1500 characters, never enough he has found when gibbering at the NYTimes to convey all the ways in which the Right schemes and plots to steal our precious democracy.
Off the rails again! Not relating to today's topical thread, however about a week or so ago I mentioned this article in a comment re the current issue of Vanity Fair on the Roe v. Wade "Accidental Activist" It is finally available to be read online. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/02/norma-mccorvey-roe-v-wade-abortion