The NY Times Editorial delivers a brief on Antonin Scalia.
Justice Scalia is now getting attention for his outlandish view, expressed in an interview in the magazine California Lawyer, that the promise of equal protection in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment does not extend to protecting women against sex discrimination. ... [Scalia's] "originalist" approach is wholly antithetical to the framers’ understanding that vital questions of people’s rights should not be left solely to the political process. It also disrespects the wording of the Equal Protection Clause, which is intentionally broad, and its purpose of ensuring a fairer society.
Bob Herbert tells you exactly what you can expect from a GOP congress: bad reruns.
Maybe the voters missed the entertainment value of the hard-hearted, compulsively destructive G.O.P. headliners. Maybe they viewed them the way audiences saw the larger-than-life villains in old-time melodramas. It must be something like that because it’s awfully hard to miss the actual policies of a gang that almost wrecked the country.
Paul Krugman fears that we'll mistake the slightest glimmer of light in the economic news for actual sunshine.
We’re not talking Morning in America here. Construction shows no sign of returning to bubble-era levels, nor are there any indications that debt-burdened families are going back to their old habits of spending all they earned. But all we needed for a modest economic rebound was for construction to stop falling and saving to stop rising — and that seems to be happening. Forecasters have been marking up their predictions; growth as high as 4 percent this year now looks possible.
It's worth nothing that "morning in America," also wasn't morning in America -- it was the intro tune for the deepest recession... until this one.
David Brooks says it's not the size of the government in the fight, it's how willing that government is to tell you what constitutes good values. Really.
Ruth Markus plays concern troll over fillibuster reform, an increasingly popular position on the right and a sign that reformers are actually scaring these guys. If Markus doesn't leave you chuckling, just scan the page for Mitch McConnell's deep concerns.
Harold Meyerson explains how corporations have dislodged the city on the hill and sent it skidding toward the valley of despair.
Until the housing and financial bubbles burst, of course, we enjoyed the illusion of prosperity through the days of wine and credit. Now we stand on unfamiliar terrain in which almost all the signs of long-term economic health point downward. ... there's a third way to look at the recession: that it's institutional, that it's the consequence of the decisions by leading banks and corporations to stop investing in the job-creating enterprises that were the key to broadly shared prosperity.
And can I add an Amen, brother?
Matt Miller notices one of those things you sort of wish the press might have mentioned back in, say October: most opposition to health care reform makes no sense.
Republican Rep. Phil Roe of Tennessee takes the new year's first prize. On MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell Monday night, Roe griped that Obamacare was fatally flawed, and he boasted that he wasn't going to avail himself of the congressional health-care plan, whose choice among private insurance options resembles the structure of Obama's reform. O'Donnell pointed out that this was hardly a sacrifice, because Roe is 65 and thus covered by Medicare
So you're heading for the moon, only your spaceship just kind of... exploded in midjourney and now guys on the other end of a scratchy radio are explaining how you're stuck on a 500,000 mile trip with an air recycler made from duct tape. What did the conversations with Apollo 13 really sound like? Thanks to recently released transcripts, we have a better idea.
If you're thinking that you might slip around the other side of the world to avoid the gray and cold of the US winter, well, the cold might be avoidable, but folks in Australia's Queensland have been seeing way too many clouds.
More than 200,000 people have been affected, 10 have died, and repairs and salvage will cost billions.
For a place that's usually dry, and unfortunately pretty flat, this much rain is serious business.