After 160+ air sorties against ISIS positions, we are able to deduce at least one guiding principal of American policy.

While we "sit shiva" for hostages, and refuse to negotiate for their release, ostensibly to prevent the ongoing funding of the terrorist enterprise, when it comes to bombing oil wells (let alone the trucks that carry the fruits thereof across the Turkish border) we stay our hand.

WTF??

It's hard out here for a voter in Florida's 19th Congressional District (Tampa/Ft. Meyers)

First they awoke one morning last year to learn that their landslide elected (62%) first term representative, Trey Radel (late of talk radio--are you listening, Rush?) had been caught buying coke from a snitch in a Washington D.C. sting operation.

Then they had to put up with months of bullshit, including a month of residential rehab for alcoholism (wtf?) while he squirmed to avoid resigning.

It has become a commonplace observation amongst historians of the interface between politics and jurisprudence that the enunciation of Roe v Wade, as much as it brought immediate relief from unwanted pregnancy to hundreds of thousands of women, had the perverse effect of truncating the slow but inexorable progress of democratic reform of patriarchal anti-choice law.