A series of gorgeous pics of the rapidly changing polar regions, via NASA’s IceBridge aerial survey mission.
Over the last few months we’ve seen a steady and by any historical standard rapid Republican withdrawal from the politics of immigrant-bashing. First, the elites in the party, then the would-be presidentials and then last week basically all the hold outs among the Tea Partiers in the House. In military terms, it’s not so much a rout as the army just fading away.
I think that’s great for the country. But it does make you wonder, what happened to this being a core issue to GOP base voters last year? Read More
Some pretty amazing numbers from Pew on how Republicans view the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court.
Compare that to this chart based on an academic study of the right-ward shift of the court.
Looks like Ted Cruz may be the final holdout on immigration reform.
Here’s why Anthony Kennedy may be the key Justice in the upcoming marriage equality cases before the Supreme Court.
A new Gallup poll shows that 66% of respondents do not believe drone strikes should be used against suspected terrorists within the United States. And an even larger number, 79% of respondents, don’t believe strikes should be permitted in the United States against suspected terrorists who are US citizens. Read More
TPM Reader MR has more in our discussion of Zero Dark Thirty and torture …
Like other responders, I’m also a produced screenwriter. In resp to the various ZD30 comments:
1) IMO, Bigelow & Boal purposely played it down the middle and captured very well the public’s ambiguous attitude toward torture, and the fog surrounding its efficacy. The fact that serious people are having serious, good faith disagreements about B+B’s intent seems proof of that.
We in America, rightly or wrongly, often assume we’re in the rearguard on issues like gay rights and marriage equality (at least in terms of federal legislation) — certainly vis a vis many European countries. Yet the reaction in this country has been relatively tepid in the face of the huge changes over the last couple years. By contrast, hundreds of thousands of opponents turned out yesterday in Paris to protest a new bill legalizing full equality in France and at the end of the rally it actually turned violent.