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According to the news media, America's biggest concern right now should be the silliness of Jack Lew's signature. That's the kind of week it's been, at least among the inside-the-Beltway cocktail party circuit.
Last night, on a primetime television show, a character had an abortion. Does this shock you? It might, if only for the fact that such a plotline is so incredibly rare on American television. In less than two weeks, the Supreme Court decision in the landmark Roe v. Wade case will be forty years old. Four decades later, the debate over abortion still rages. But it is a debate which is largely silent on the small screen. Even last night, abortion did not really dare to speak its name.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as "Obamacare") put Republican governors between an ideological rock and a very hard place for conservatives. After losing their court challenge on the constitutionality of Obamacare, each state's governor was faced with a clear choice: either set up a state-run health insurance marketplace (or "exchange"), or refuse to do so and pass the buck to the federal government, which will set up an exchange for states who opt not to create one on their own.
If we had a "best quote" awards category, we'd certainly have to nominate what outgoing House Republican Steven La Tourette had to say about the whole situation, after the Senate had voted 89-8 to approve the fiscal cliff avoidance deal: "We should not take a package put together by a bunch of sleep-deprived octogenarians on New Year's Eve." Now that's funny!
A happy chart indeed for Obama fans. Last month I predicted this rise by noting that many of the nationwide polling operations just ceased polling after the election was over. This dearth of data meant that while Obama's numbers were climbing fast, the "poll of polls" average at RealClearPolitics.com was dragged downwards by pre-election numbers still being averaged in. While I did predict that Obama's numbers would continue to rise in December (as more and more data came in), I will admit that even I was surprised at size of the post-election bump which Obama managed.
Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!
Welcome to the seventh annual homage (which sounds so much nicer than "blatant ripoff," don't you think?) to the television show The McLaughlin Group, since they have the most extensive year-end award category list of anyone around. Since "extensive" is my middle name (well, not really, although I do tend to wander off into the parenthetical wilderness at times, do I not?), such a long list fits right in here.
I realize that watching the fiscal cliff negotiations in Washington has been likened to stylized Kabuki theater more than once by pundits far and wide, but I'm going to push this metaphor for all it is worth today. You might even say I'm going to push it right over a cliff, but that would be a horrendous metaphor mixture indeed.
We're all talking about the same thing today. We are, indeed, having a "national conversation." The subject is tragic, which is why it has everyone so focused. Another shooting rampage, another town consumed by grief, all played out on the nation's television screens. But precisely because everyone's talking about it, I find that I don't have much to add to the main discussion. All I have are a few fragments that are mostly peripheral in nature, and mostly to do with the news media.
What's that? Mayans? Not Maya Rudolph? Man, I've got to start paying closer attention to these things. I'm still trying to figure out what sort of omen it is that Paul McCartney performed with Nirvana on 12/12/12, personally. Maybe not the end times, but certainly the strange times.