As you know we’ve been publishing the seemingly endless number of cases of children, playing with guns, accidentally shooting each other, sometimes fatally. The stories speak for themselves. But I wanted to share with you this reader email which brings us right up close to what this means, for decades after the gun is fired. It’s really a must-read.

11 year old shot to death with a handgun by another child, apparently while playing with a gun at home.

We tend to focus on the eerie power and invincibility of drones. But what about when a military drone crashes on a highway in Florida, the second crash in a week?

Market Yakker Jim Cramer says, no way, our CNBC talkers totally bested Elizabeth Warren.

Here’s why I’m experiencing a little schadenfreude over the news that Liz Cheney’s gonna run for Senate. And it has almost nothing to do with her dad, or the possibility that she’ll win her primary and give Democrats an opening to run nationwide against the return of Cheney.

Liz Cheney is the über-Republican. She personifies the fusionist nature of her party better than anyone I can think of. She spouts the kind of extreme rhetoric you might expect to hear from paranoid, socially conservative base voters and certain back-bench members of the House GOP, but her politics are textbook Beltway hawkish conservatism — axe social insurance programs, cut taxes, deregulate industries, swagger in foreign affairs, etc. Read More

Obamacare supporters are taking a much-needed victory lap this morning over the news that the law will dramatically reduce individual market premiums in New York state.

That’s a political coup for Democrats, both because the headlines look nice and because they point to the reality that the law will make life better for thousands of people. New York’s a big state!

But as I’m sure others have already pointed out, New York’s also a unique state. And the health policy status quo there makes today’s news entirely predictable. Read More

Bob Filner, the Democratic Mayor of San Diego at the center of a cringe-tastic and seemingly endless sexual harassment scandal, is slated to give the keynote address at a benefit for victims of sexual assault.

Some readers are asking whether Progressive Senescent Columnist Fogeyism is related to a term I coined a few years back, ‘Chronic Racial Grandpaism‘.

I would say they’re related but PSCF is the formal diagnostic category that the DSM-V has chosen. And ‘chronic racial grandpaism’ is something that goes well beyond the world of columnists.

As many of you in the psychiatric-therapeutic and stand up comedy professions know, there was an extremely lengthy process preceding the publication of DSM-V last May, the authoritative guide to diagnoses in the mental health world. And as everyone is coming together today to critique and make fun of Richard Cohen’s race column, I wanted to mention a new designation that was not included but almost certainly should have been: Progressive Senescent Columnist Fogeyism (PSCF), an increasingly common ailment in an aging America. (Sometimes Columnist is incorrectly referred to as ‘columnar’.) Read More

We already know that, Jonnie Williams, the donor at the center of the gifts scandal dragging down Gov. McDonnell (R-VA) also gave unreported gifts to his would-be Republicans successor Ken Cuccinelli (R-VA), which are threatening to tank his campaign. Now it turns out he’s seem to have had the same routine going with the Republican who ran for Governor immediately before McDonnell. In other words, three in a row. And to top it off, that guy, Jerry Kilgore, is the guy representing Williams in the investigation. Here’s the story.