Thanks to Hal for referencing The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus on Hillary Clinton the other day.  I don't read Marcus too regularly, but when I do, it reminds me why not reading her is probably an IQ booster.

As a caustic Clinton critic and tenacious tart-tongued TPP traducer, my reaction to Hillary's announcement that she opposes the multi-nation "free trade" deal should be obvious.  I would openly question her commitment to the working Americans she says the partnership will hurt.  I would doubt that she really cares that giveaways in the deal to pharmaceutical companies will hurt consumers.

So, the latest Republican self-immolation in the House apparently has now also spun off nasty little rumors of an affair between two Members of the House. Let me say, straight off, that I don't give a damn whether or not that's true. My issue with today's Republicans is not the conduct of their private lives, but the scandalous and shocking conduct of their public lives.

As you have all seen by now, Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has dramatically withdrawn from the race for Speaker of the House. As every news story has made clear, McCarthy was undone by the opposition of a group of hard-liners (probably about forty of them). What the news stories don't make clear is that those hard-liners could not have come close to beating McCarthy at the caucus election where McCarthy resigned.

Once upon a time, long before The National Rifle Association stopped being a reasonable, responsible hunter's association and became the NRA, the Second Amendment was looked on, if at all, as a remnant of the olden days, when the writers of the Constitution saw fit to assuage the fears of the states by assuring them they could form their own state militias in case the federal government got too bossy, thinking they owned the place.

These days, even though nothing about it has changed, the Second Amendment is the one and only part of the Constitution actually seen as constitutional by the Right Wing. (Causing certain politicians who don't know what's going on to keep repeating the magic words, "Second Amendment". It gets them votes, so what the hell?)

Read more at Crooks & Liars.

I admit, as a smoker in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I found those "Truth" anti-smoking ads to be pretty obnoxious and I expected that they would be no more effective than the "Just Say No," anti-drug ads of the 1980s.  But I was actually a little older than "The Truth" was aiming for, and a little too set in my ways. I had to find my own path away from nicotine. The Truth ads, meanwhile, were effective enough that a whole lot of people who were 5-15 years younger than me never had to waste any time or money on tobacco, much less endure the trial of quitting.  Good for The Truth.

The front page of Friday's Washington Post includes reporter David Farenthold's hit piece on Bernie Sanders. Much closer in tone and content to Charles Krauthammer on a bad day than legitimate journalism, Farenthold's commentary is expertly debunked by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich at Huffington Post and macroeconomist Dean Baker of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

. . .And, of course, what’s also routine is that somebody, somewhere will comment and say, Obama politicized this issue.  Well, this is something we should politicize.  It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.

Four years ago, I blogged about my old friend and colleague Kevin Hogan, a Massachusetts teacher who was ambushed in a parking lot by a Fox News reporter peddling a sex scandal.

In the U.S., most people get their health insurance through their employers because... well, because the government wants it that way. 

During World War II, American industry needed workers to meet the industrial needs caused by a gigantic war.  That demand for workers resulted in enormous wage inflation and the government decided to stop that by putting compensation caps into place.  Remember that next time somebody tells you that the government can't interfere with the markets by, say, regulating drug prices.  When it came to wages for ordinary people, the government interfered in the markets without much regret.

While much of the country was still coming off of the Papal Visit high last week (it was a trip, wasn't it?), that parade was not only rained on yesterday, it was deluged.

Less than a week after Pope Francis the Terrific thrilled the country with a visit that filled our very souls with joy (Right?), the Papal love-fest is threatening to become a veritable wash-out. How did this happen? How could it happen?

(Posting at Crooks and Liars.  Read more here.)

A common answer to a liberal who objects that Pope Francis decided to meet privately with Kentucky County Clerk and homophobic bigot Kim Davis is that, hey, he's a Catholic and he doesn't support same sex marriage anyway, so what's the problem?

This past Sunday Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a justly lauded speech at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate. Warren focused on the interplay between racial and economic injustice in America over the past 80 years. “Prominent [Black Lives Matter] activist DeRay McKesson,” according to Salon, “praised Warren as better than any other politician on her understanding 'that the American dream has been sustained by an intentional violence[.]'” (Emphasis supplied.) I fear McKesson got Warren's message precisely wrong.

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed how quiet the resident meanies were while the Pope was here? Even Donald Trump gave it a rest for a few days.  Or am I wrong?  Did I just not notice because, to their credit (and my relief), the press took to covering the Pope every day in every way and kept it nice?
 

Interesting piece in The New York Times about the origins of the Rockefeller drug laws and the tough on crime stance of Harlem social activists in the 1960s.  It seems a classic case of a community giving up power for safety and being abused for it.  I only take issue here with the total focus on black communities within the city -- over-policing is now a problem throughout America.

So, last year I had an Ask Me About Shakespeare thread that people seemed to enjoy. (Answers to the first round of questions are at the link.) Let's try it again.

Scott Walker has left the Republican presidential primaries: the first dropout who was once considered a major contender for the nomination. That, and the departure of Rick Perry, leaves us with only fourteen or fifteen candidates left. In fact, the real number is much smaller than that, because of an economic concept called the Pareto principle; there have never been sixteen choices, because the Pareto principle cuts the number down to a smaller number of practical options.