[ 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 Monday, April 8th, 2013 – 17:05 UTC ]
The 2012 election happened over five months ago, at the beginning of November. One notable result of this election was that two states -- Washington and Colorado -- voted to legalize marijuana for adult recreational use. This was a direct challenge to federal drug policy. We are all still waiting for the Obama administration's response. I don't know about you, but I, for one, am getting a little sick and tired of the wait.
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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 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 Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013 – 16:15 UTC ]
The sharper-eyed among you may have noticed that yesterday was supposed to be Obama Poll Watch day, where we offer up our monthly musings on the state of Barack Obama's public job approval rating. Well, since yesterday was a rather auspicious date on the calendar, we decided to push the poll-watching to Wednesday. Also, because we're still working on the charts.
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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 Monday, March 25th, 2013 – 16:48 UTC ]
No matter what the Supreme Court decides, after hearing this week's arguments, I think America has reached the tipping point on the subject of gay marriage. I say that because I think that gay marriage is going to win, in the end -- even if the Supreme Court ducks the issue this year. As civil rights battles go, the country has moved extraordinarily fast to where we find ourselves now: the point of no return. Victory for gay rights activists is not assured this time around, but it should now be seen as almost inevitable. Which makes this a very historic point in American progress.
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