9:12 PM: Is it possible to unite Congress against heroin? Is that where we are?
9:16 PM: Even the fractional chance that Donald Trump could be given this speech in twelve months is enough to make me think, Okay, this might be the last State of the Union.
9:24 PM: This feels like the most tepid State of the Union I’ve maybe ever heard. It’s like having Obama start with, ‘okay I’m really not going to go into any policy stuff I’m just going to go big picture about the future’, kind of left everyone feeling, what are we going to get angry and yell about?
9:31 PM: Maybe a different way to put it might be: “Okay, I don’t really care about this partisan stuff anymore. I’m just going to give you the big picture as I see it.”
9:32 PM: Okay, the Sputnick thing was a great line. That really does capture it.
9:35 PM: Now, we seem to be hitting a groove.
9:01 PM: I guess this has been evolving over a few years. But does anyone else find it jarring that the members of the hard-right faction on the Supreme Court simply don’t attend the State of the Union anymore? Roberts must feel, rightly, that as the senior official of one of the three branches of government he really must be there. But what about Scalia, Thomas and Alito?
Constitutional law prof says Cruz is ineligible for the presidency.
In a highly proud day for the State of New York, the village of Whitesboro, New York has voted to retain the village seal which appears to show a white man throttling or chocking an Indian. As I said, a proud moment, though village resident Scott Hastings, makes clear that he won’t be pushed around. “Political correctness, who cares? This is our village, who cares what the world thinks? I want to see this settled today. Once and for all.”
But part of me wonders whether this isn’t a more appropriate or at least more historically accurate way of representing the country’s and perhaps this village’s origins.
There is a price for making everyone you come into contact with think you’re an asshole and a jerk. Back in 2008, Republican and Democratic Senators came together to pass a sense of the Senate resolution affirming that John McCain was a natural born citizen. Claire McCaskill says today that she won’t be doing any similar favors for purported American Ted Cruz. But it’s not just a Democrat. The silence of Senate Republicans is positively deafening. Mitch McConnell also says he’s not getting involved. Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney have both tried to put the kibosh on the growing Cruz-birther movement. But in the Senate, where people know Ted Cruz, virtually no one is coming to his aid. McCain himself is suggesting he’s at least Cruz-birther-curious if not coming out as a full-blown Cruz birther.
Meet the White Supremacists who see Donald Trump as their “great white hope” and who Trump is bringing into the mainstream.
Bundy militants start searching government files and databases to “expose” transgressions of federal employees.
Will allowing the Bundys to destroy federal property with impunity encourage a culture of lawlessness in other members of the rural white community in the West?
Mark Fenster, a University of Florida law professor and expert on conspiracy theories, will visit the Hive for a chat with Prime members.
Fenster, the author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, studies how and why conspiracy theories circulate and the effects that they have on culture and politics. He’s also working on a forthcoming book on government secrecy, which asks why are we never satisfied with the amount of information the government discloses.
He’ll be stopping by at 2 PM on Friday January 15th to answer Prime members’ questions about his research and the conspiracy theories currently bubbling away on the fringes of the American political sphere. Please drop them here at or before 2 PM Friday. See you then!