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So the good news this week was apparently that giant mutant space monsters are not, in fact, about to arrive and (assumably) enslave humankind and eat our children for snacks.
For your viewing enjoyment this year, we introduce... (drumroll, please...):
Kittens!
President Obama just had his most stable month ever in the public opinion polls. This month also caps off a truly remarkable year of polling stability for Obama.
President Barack Obama has a busy week scheduled, as Congress begins the lame duck session. Everyone in Washington has a few busy weeks ahead, until the 111th Congress wraps up business and heads off into the sunset, but President Obama will be at the center of this whirlwind. So it's worth taking a look at how the week is going to play out. To put it in football-watching terms, we're just returning from the "two-minute warning" commercial break, in the fourth quarter. And anything could happen.
Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I thought that was a pretty good week for Democrats.
Democrats seem to be eager to fight a few battles before the sun sets on the 111th Congress. Strong statements have come from the most unlikely people. Votes are being scheduled on some very contentious issues. This push seems coordinated between the White House, the Senate, the House, and even the Pentagon. Meaning that the lame duck session might be a lot more productive than generally assumed, in the end.
Representative Bruce Braley, from Iowa's First District, returned to the House of Representatives this week, after surviving a very brutal re-election campaign in which millions of dollars of outside money from anonymous right-wing donors were spent against him. His campaign was an interesting one, because rather than try to distance himself from his own party or from what Democrats have accomplished in the past few years, Braley instead embraced his own record, and proudly defended it to his voters.
Republicans in Congress are going to be interesting to watch for the next two years, as they try to cope with the influx of the Tea Party Republicans who have just been elected to office. Some of these skirmishes are happening already, as both parties prepare to hold their official party caucus meetings this week, where they will vote on their leadership positions and on their policies for the next Congress. The Tea Party Republicans failed to elevate Representative Michele Bachmann to the lowest rung of the House leadership positions, causing her to withdraw her candidacy last week. But just today, the Tea Partiers seem to have won a policy battle over in the Senate, as the establishment Republican leader Mitch McConnell just announced that he has seen the light on banning earmarks -- a dramatic reversal of his position up to this point.
But for anyone who thinks that American voters just elected a bunch of clowns to represent them in Washington, I humbly draw your attention to Brazil, where they just elected a real clown to their Congress.
The town of Mountain Pass, California, is about as close to a ghost town as you can get without actually being empty. The town lies fifteen miles in from the Nevada border, on the interstate highway route from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. It is a mining boom town that went bust -- and not back in the Wild West days, but very recently. But it's not just any mining town out in the desert, it's a very special one.