Today was the day Chief Justice Roberts creeped out the Republicans by doing the unthinkable:  He figured out a way to square the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) with the constitution and gave it his okay (if not exactly his blessing).  Such a donnybrook!  The Dems couldn't believe it, but the Republicans couldn't believe it even more. 

CNN is also reporting that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is alive and well and that Dewey beat Truman.

More on the SCOTUS decision to uphold ObamaCare from Think Progress.

My friends, the United States of America is at a crossroads. These perilous times have seen a rise in racism, misogyny, and outrage. The union cannot survive this level of anger for much longer.

This why it is vital for White Males in America to begin a serious and mature discussion about these issues. We must be open and honest about issues of race and gender. It is up to us to help America regain harmony.

The Supreme Court will rule on Monday about whether or not the federal government can require people to buy health insurance from private insurance companies.  My own view is that, under the commerce clause, it can.  But, I see the point of conservatives here.  The mandate is probably the single biggest subsidy of a private, for profit, industry in history.

The debacle at the University of Virginia, whose Board of Visitors hastily fired President Teresa Sullivan, has been a lesson in how business-oriented trustees can urge bad business practices.

So after many, many months of glorying in his efforts to break public worker contracts in his great state of Michigan (formerly our great state of Michigan), Governor Ricky has decided that it's not okay to break a contract when it's a contract Governor Ricky doesn't want to break.

Governor Ricky is in the bridge-building business these days. (Real bridge-building, not the kind that builds bridges of understanding or cooperation.  Do NOT accuse him of such a thing!)

It's speculative, but some non-partisan tax specialists have looked over Paul Ryan's budget and have come to the very reasonable conclusion that the only way you can cut taxes on rich people while maintaining budget neutrality is to raise taxes on the middle class (probably the amorphous "upper middle class," that everybody thinks they're part of.

For too long, the Internet has run amok. It has been a free-for-all of freedom of speech and distraction. It has made men billionaires and ruined the lives of others. It has become an all-powerful juggernaut in our lives.

Actually, I don't mean brilliant politics here.  It may be.  But I really mean brilliant ethics.  There is no doubt in my mind that people who came to the United States as children, who were raised here and work here and who consider this their culture, not should be allowed to stay.

I'm out of the country right now, but even so I can't avoid the uproar over Teresa Sullivan being pushed out as President of the University of Virginia after only two years.

Funny day in Op-Ed land.  David Brooks veers hard right to try to explain why Republicans have veered hard right.  His line is, "This is the source of Republican extremism: the conviction that the governing model is obsolete. It needs replacing."

In the petty police state of Michigan (used to be Michigan, My Michigan; now it isn't) two state reps got a time out yesterday for talking naughty during a pre-vote session on some fancy new man-made anti-abortion bills. These two elected representatives of the people were told they could not speak for an entire day because they "ignored the rules of decorum" and got a little huffy with the menfolks.

Spare me, David Brooks.

His column today is about columns.  Well, it starts off about monument designs and why they stink now.  Seriously, who really sees the relative decline of monument esthetics as emblematic of what's wrong with America today?  The music used to be better, too, David.  Maybe that's the problem?  Or maybe you're just wrong?

I admit that, years ago, I was entranced by what Jeremy Rifkin called "The European Dream," which was not just a monetary union but, in his mind, a political union that could, unlike the United States, expand almost without limit to include an ever widening periphery, someday stretching as far south as northern Africa.

As much as we all sorely wished that the recall effort in Wisconsin would succeed, I don't know many people who were actually shocked when it failed on Tuesday.  The odds against winning were formidable.

A colleague of mine, a very smart man but not in sync with me politically, told me a few weeks ago that he believes that I will come to my senses before the election and pull the lever for Mitt Romney.  I will make this decision, he assures me, based solely on Obama's mishandling of the economy and I will realize that the various issues that I have with the Republican party, Tea Party crazies and the religious right, do not apply to Romney.

Last week a colleague made his case, and it's a strong one, for re-electing Barack Obama. Let me add my own case, for those who feel (like many of our Dagblog readers and commenters) that Obama is not progressive enough.

If you would like to have a president more progressive than Barack Obama, the only way to make that happen in the next twenty years (or more) is to re-elect Barack Obama first.

You may be familiar with the theories of military historian and conservative political adviser William S Lind, that warfare has undergone several major transformations, or generations, since the formation of nation-states.

Very briefly, First Generation, or Formation Warfare (1GW) is where armies line up in formation and fire at each other. Second Generation, or Trench Warfare (2GW) is where armies use trenches as cover from massed firepower. Third Generation, or Maneuver Warfare (3GW) is where armies exploit machinery to maneuver much more quickly than the opponent. And Fourth Generation or, Insurgent Warfare (4GW) applies asymmetrical strategy and tactics against a superior conventional military force, intending to sap the opponent nation's political will to fight.

It shouldn't be news to anyone that Michigan is under siege.  There is a whole contingency out there trying to get the word out, including Chris Savage at Eclectablog, Eric B.

I spent most of Memorial Day weekend, all but the day itself, at my spouse's college reunion. It was a lovely weekend among pleasant people on a delightful campus. My spouse went to an extremely famous college very much like the one I went to. In fact, our old schools are traditional rivals, which means that they resemble each other so deeply and thoroughly that they need football to create the illusion that there's any difference.