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We continue our running series of taking a serious look at all the announced candidates for president with two new entries this week, one from each side of the aisle. Republican Lindsey Graham made his formal announcement earlier in the week, and today Democrat Lincoln Chafee is also set to announce his candidacy.
We're going to begin today with a rather loaded question. How much attention do you think the media should be paying towards a presidential nominee who is right now getting 13 to 15 percent support in public opinion polls of their party's voters?
We've got everything from hippies to Satanists to cover this week, so let's just dive right in, shall we?
The Supreme Court heard a monumental case on marriage equality, which could indeed be their last case ever on the subject (if Justice Kennedy votes the way many expect him to, resulting in gay marriage in all [...]
The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on a marriage equality case tomorrow. At this point, it almost seems anticlimactic. Either the Supreme Court will rule that gay marriage is a constitutional right everywhere in America, or they'll try to punt and say that all states have to recognize all marriages from other states, but don't have to perform their own gay marriages if they don't want to. Either way, gay marriage will become a reality in some awfully conservative states (whether couples have to take a vacation to another state to achieve it or not). The only question now is whether marriage equality will achieve a final and total victory, or just a partial victory. Either way, losing the progress that has already been made seems almost inconceivable at this point.
Strange but true, the "Scooby van" is now part of our political lexicon. Hillary Clinton herself is apparently to blame for this one, as this was the playful name she came up with for the van she used to get from New York to Iowa this week. The media, as it will be doing for the next year and a half over pretty much any new aspect of Hillary Clinton's campaign (and we do mean "any new aspect at all -- even the laughably trivial"), quite predictably, freaked out.
For the uninformed, Pi Day is a yearly celebration of a date on the calendar, for its numerical significance. It ranks up there among geeky holidays with the fourth of May ("Star Wars Day," since you can go around wishing everyone "May the Fourth be with you!"). The significance is it will be "3/14" (at least in the United States, as Europeans write their dates differently). These are the first three digits in the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, or "pi."
But this year's Pi Day will be the best one for the next 100 years, because a whole bunch of digits will come into play. Pi's value is, to 10 digits: 3.141592653. This year's Pi Day will be 3/14/15. Taking it a step further, just before 9:30 AM tomorrow morning, the date and time will read: 3/14/15 -- 9:26:53. Woo hoo! Best Pi Day of the century!
Roy Moore, the chief justice of Alabama's state supreme court, is making a stand in the courthouse door. This is not literally happening, the way it did back in 1963 when Alabama's Governor George Wallace made a similar stand in the schoolhouse door. But the motivation is similar; a classic standoff between states' rights and federal legal supremacy over state law. In both Moore's and Wallace's cases, high Alabama officials are defying federal civil rights legal orders -- and the United States Supreme Court -- to preserve the state's ability to legally discriminate against a segment of its population.
That headline certainly does promise a large amount of schadenfreude over the misfortunes of a certain former vice presidential nominee (and half-term governor of Alaska), doesn't it? Well, that'll all have to wait for the end of this column, where we will be supplanting our normal talking points section with a few choice conservative reviews of Sarah Palin's recent speech in Iowa. But before we dive into this snarktastic dessert of vicious quips, we've first got to get through the meat and potatoes of the politics of the week.
I have to apologize right here at the start, because that headline is not original. Credit should go to Chuck Todd of NBC, who stated during the State Of The Union coverage this week that President Obama had stolen the traditional post-election "honeymoon" period with the public right out from under the Republican Party's feet. We found this such an apt metaphor that we decided to run with it, so: "Thanks, Chuck!"
Because it is both playoff season in the football world and State Of The Union season in the political world, I felt it was high time to mix a metaphor or two. Because even though we're at the very earliest stage of the 2016 presidential race, it seems like the Democrats are pretty close to locking in "home-field advantage" on the subject of wages and inequality in America. By which I mean Democrats will be debating Republicans on very familiar territory for the Democratic Party, and very foreign soil for the Republicans. As in sports, this in no way guarantees a victory in "The Big Game," but it certainly does help the Democrats' chances.