While everyone's eyes are on fiscal cliff fiasco postmortems, filibuster reform may quietly be dying. Harry Reid's punting until the next congress is sworn in, hoping to get a more favorable Senate. Once again, the words "seeking a bipartisan ____" carry with them the stench of death. Partisan steamrollers are needed to get anything done. That's the new reality. You wonder why Democratic leadership are so slow to learn that.
The War on Drugs is the best thing to ever happen to the prison-industrial complex. There's a lot of money in incarcerating people that every other sane country in the world treats for addiction. Want to reduce wasteful spending and promote liberty? Gutting and defanging the private prison industry and their lobbyists would be a real nice way to start.
John Boehner preemptively walks away from any future negotiations with the White House. I'm not kidding. I guess from now on, all the heavy lifting will be done by the Senate, because that made everyone in Boehner's caucus so damned happy in the fiscal cliff fiasco, right? I swear, I becoming more and more convinced that Boehner's a bona fide moron with each passing day.
Chris Christie, the Republican Governor of New Jersey, is shocked to discover that being a Republican means not giving a crap about people in need -- especially those Tea Party-type Republicans like, say, Chris Christie, the Republican Governor of New Jersey. Someone find him a fainting couch.
Rep. Brian Sims officially becomes Pennsylvania's first elected openly gay official.
Hillary Clinton has been released from the hospital. Apparently everything went great with removing her blood clot. Good to hear.
Ezra Klein says the White House won the fiscal cliff fight -- with reservations. Meanwhile, Nate Silver argues that it's hard to tell who won, since no one was extremely clear on exactly what they wanted.
As promised, part two of Sam Wang's ongoing report on Republican election-rigging shenanigans: "How many voters were disenfranchised?"
Can we please stop worrying about violence in pop culture in relation to mass killings? Everyone sees the same movies, everyone watches the same TV shows, everyone listens to the same music and plays the same video games. Yet only America suffers massacre after massacre after massacre in non-combat situations. The problem is guns. Period. Anything else is a distraction. Stop falling for it.
Finally, you might not want to take too much time catching your breath after the fiscal cliff fiasco; here comes the debt ceiling. It could be just a stupid and frustrating. Our government is broken, because gullible people keep electing stupid people who hate government to run government. Knock it off.
[cartoon via McClatchy Newspapers]
