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The Boehner era has been one in which Republicans have accepted no responsibility for helping to govern the country, in which they have opposed anything and everything the president proposes.

Paul Krugman

My friends keep telling me That you ain't no good. Oh, but they don't know That I'd leave you if I could.

Aretha Franklin

A perfect song.

#albert king #music

If it wasn't for real bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all.

Albert King, “Born Under a Bad Sign”

#albert king #born under a bad sign #music

With more than 200,000 killed in the civil war, a wave of refugees flooding into Europe, and Russia now flying in arms and troops, the president finds himself with a geopolitical and humanitarian mess that will most likely not be settled before he leaves office in 16 months.

Peter Baker, The New York Times

The debate revealed a party wedded to the tenets of Bushism — rabid, debt-financed, regressive tax-cutting, reflexive hostility to regulation, and a pervasive anti-intellectualism.

Jonathan Chait

#politics #2016 #gopdebate

In most states of America homophobes can still legally discriminate against homosexuals, married or otherwise. That is a much graver scandal than Ms Davis’s theatrical refusal to do her job.

The Economist

Cops will stop being revenue agents and go back to being cops

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, in announcing limitations on the amount of money local governments can recoup from traffic citations.

[T]oday’s norm is an economy that is incapable of generating and sustaining broad prosperity.

The New York Times Editorial Board

Commodity producers from Australia to Brazil to Saudi Arabia have been hit hard. They (and almost everyone else) overestimated China’s long-term growth prospects.

Robert Samuelson

In the case of purveyors of hamburgers and chicken tenders, the parent companies set all sorts of detailed requirements for how these businesses should operate — and then turn around and claim that when it comes to workers’ rights, their franchises are utterly independent.

E.J. Dionne

In the aftermath of World War II, my father swam the Danube River to flee Romania and become part of a tide of refugees that nobody much cared about. Fortunately, a family in Portland, Ore., sponsored his way to the United States, making this column possible.

Nick Kristof

Economic isolation is actually growing worse across the country, as more and more minority families find themselves trapped in high-poverty neighborhoods without decent housing, schools or jobs, and with few avenues of escape.

The New York Times Editorial Board

In this era when party identification drives so much of the vote, the characteristics of individual candidates seem to matter less than they once did.

William A. Galston, The Wall Street Journal

No one has adequately explained how Trump’s 'silent majority' becomes an actual majority in a national election. When Richard Nixon coined that phrase in 1969, it was plausible that southern, George Wallace Democrats and northern, Richard Daley Democrats might be persuaded to join a new Republican coalition. The cultural chaos of the 1960s — riots, assassinations, bombings, hippies — was translated by Nixon and his brilliant political team into a mass backlash against cultural liberalism. At that point in history, as columnist Ron Brownstein has noted, U.S. voters were more than 80 percent non-college-educated whites. In recent exit polls, this group has been more like 36 percent. Despite the vivid discontents and cultural changes of the Obama years, it is difficult to imagine Trump’s coalition of the disaffected sweeping to power.

Michael Gerson

Whatever the reason [behind Walmart's decision to cease selling the AR-15 assault rifle], Americans sick of the shooting epidemic must be grateful but no less wary, for these transplanted war weapons remain widely available across the country.

The New York Times Editorial Board

The harsh sentences were clearly political, aimed at sending a message to anyone who might oppose the seizure of Crimea.

The Washington Post Editorial Board, regarding 20 and 10 year prison sentences of two political activists in Crimea. Shameful.

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