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Our column's subtitle this week is a silent homage to guitarist Alvin Lee of the band Ten Years After, who sadly died this past week. Anyone who has seen the movie Woodstock knows of Lee's incredible talent on the electric guitar, and we just wanted to begin by noting that Alvin Lee is "Goin' Home" for the last time. Requiescat In Pace.
That title is, obviously, a bit of a misnomer, since Rand Paul didn't just have a "moment" yesterday on the Senate floor -- he had a whole bunch of them. Thirteen hours' worth, in fact. Senator Paul has a tool at his disposal that his father Ron never had, and yesterday he took that tool out of its box for the first time. Paul has been in the Senate for over two years now, but yesterday was the first time he staged a "talking filibuster."
I'm going to admit right up front here that I swiped the concept for my title from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s novel Mother Night. Blue Fairy Godmother budget cuts, to define my homage, are those that can only be seen and believed in magically, and offer further magical protection from any political harm. So it goes.
We've got a number of oddities to dispense with before we get started this week.
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
I got an extraordinary amount of very well-thought-out answers from you folks, some of which I agreed with and some of which I did not. But rather than answer points in the comments, I decided the best way to enter the conversation was to just post my answers, as I sent them off. So here is the second part of last week's column. These are my "separation of powers" answers.
Tomorrow night President Obama will give the first State Of The Union address of his second term. We'll all react to this speech in different ways, but the reaction of Congress will be the usual: alternating wild and raucous applause with stony glares of disapproval, depending on the particular subject being addressed. After the speech is over, Congress will go back to what it loosely calls "work," and largely ignore the speech's suggestions for legislation. Some things the president asks for will get addressed in typical roundabout fashion, but many other things will be completely dropped for political reasons of one sort or another. It didn't always used to be this way, though, at least not on the surface. Congress used to take the president a lot more seriously, which is a tradition that seems ripe for revival.
We begin with cats and birds this week. Iron-lovers across the land were dismayed by the news that the Monopoly folks were discontinuing their favorite token, but cat-lovers were enthused by the feline token which will take its place. Being America, this was done via online voting. In avian news, the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl. The bird is the word!
This is a reader-participation sort of a column. In fact, it's not really a column at all, instead just trolling for comments from you folks. Just to warn everyone up front.
The Republican House just scored a political victory. While meaningless in financial fact, they successfully co-opted a dandy slogan -- which may have real political consequences for Senate Democrats -- and they also managed to pull the wool over the eyes of a large portion of the mainstream media while doing so. Which, as I said, has to be chalked up as a big political victory for the House Republicans.