[ Posted Friday, April 12th, 2013 – 16:56 UTC ]
In this week's news, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died. As a result, Cher fans got a scare. The dangers of hashtag parsing -- because "nowthatchersdead" can be broken up two ways. The other pop culture result of the "Iron Lady's" demise was (you can't make this stuff up) the song "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead" rocketing to the top of the British charts, even though it is three-quarters of a century old. Make of it what you will.
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[ Posted Thursday, April 11th, 2013 – 16:44 UTC ]
OK, I'll admit right up front that that title is a bit of hyperbole. I really haven't documented 4,396 other instances of Republican hypocrisy. It just feels like it, that's all. Today's installment even crosses over from garden-variety hypocrisy to full-blown Orwellian doublethink, in fact.
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[ Posted Wednesday, April 10th, 2013 – 17:07 UTC ]
Democrats seem to be showing slightly more enthusiasm these days for attacking the endless filibustering in the Senate by Republicans. If this truly is the beginning of a trend, it would be notable, but it's too early so far to say that it's going to gain political traction or not. We're still waiting for the votes to be counted, to put this another way. But while the glimmerings seen recently from Democrats may not be sustained, it's still worth pointing them out, if only to encourage such behavior among the party at large.
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[ Posted Friday, April 5th, 2013 – 17:56 UTC ]
With that out of the way, we're going to take a quick overview of what the media considers the big stories of the week, and we're going to end up in the Talking Points section with all the stories you may have missed due to the media being distracted by this stuff, just for fun.
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[ Posted Thursday, April 4th, 2013 – 16:29 UTC ]
President Obama is in the news this week, for voluntarily giving up five percent of his yearly pay, to show solidarity with federal workers who will be adversely financially affected by the sequester cuts. This will save the American taxpayer $20,000. This may be a drop in the bucket, so I thought I'd offer up a suggestion as to how to save a lot more money, on a permanent basis: abolish the offices of the two congressional chaplains.
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[ Posted Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013 – 16:13 UTC ]
OK, with that out of the way, let's have a look at March's polling. President Obama lost almost all the ground he had gained late in the 2012 election season, and his numbers fell back to where he was roughly six months ago. This isn't as bad as some media have made it out to be, since it may represent Obama's true natural level of support. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, let's take a look at this month's chart:
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[ Posted Monday, April 1st, 2013 – 14:55 UTC ]
Senator Marco Rubio, Cuban-American from Florida, is now officially "on deck." He is idly swinging a practice bat back and forth, in anticipation of his first real major-league performance. This moment, it should be noted, has taken a long time to get here. Rubio was elected to the Senate, after all, in the Great Tea Party Shellacking Of 2010. He's had over two years in the Senate now but has yet to put his stamp of approval on any comprehensive immigration legislation, even though he treats it as his own private issue within the Republican Party. Rubio enjoys being seen as "working hard" on some sort of legislative breakthrough on immigration, but up until now, that breakthrough has never actually happened. There's a good reason for that, and the reason is that his fellow Tea Party Republicans (mostly over in the House) are quite content to have Marco Rubio "working hard" on an immigration bill, but they're never going to support anything he actually comes up with. By supporting Rubio "working hard" on the issue, they can conveniently do nothing and (they hope) defuse the issue among the voters.
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[ Posted Friday, March 29th, 2013 – 17:14 UTC ]
The big news towards the end of the week was "stupid things Republicans say," of course, but we're saving most of that for the "Talking Points" part of the program.
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[ Posted Friday, March 22nd, 2013 – 17:08 UTC ]
Welcome to the 250th Friday Talking Points column!
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[ Posted Wednesday, March 20th, 2013 – 16:39 UTC ]
Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus is in the news this week, for his "autopsy" report on the Republican Party in the 2012 election. Priebus and a few other hardy Republican souls took months to examine what went wrong for the party, and what should be done to set things right for the next time around. Their prescription for change, unfortunately, is to change how their message is delivered rather than to change much in the way of Republican policies. I'm certainly not the first to point this out, but this idea works out to exactly the same as what you are left with when you remove the vowels from the national party chairman's name: RNC PR BS.
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