The American Spectator

“My first concern is the person doesn’t understand the risks,” Mr. Douglass said.

(July 23, 2012)

The Progressive

The lonely fate of soon to be ex-Congressman John Conyers, the scamp who promised on C-SPAN to turn the Feds on The American Spectator as a consequence of its merry investigation of the Clinton outfit—more evidence of the Spectator’s curse. To think he would end up with his own Monica scandal!

Now Conyers’s congressional career is on the brink of closure. He was touched by scandal when his wife, Monica, was sentenced to thirty-seven months in prison in March 2010 for taking bribes while a member of the Detroit City Council. Although he was innocent of any involvement in the affair, his reputation took a hit nonetheless.

(August 2012)

Daily Beast

A highly agitated Michael Tomasky, one week before the Supreme Court’s decision on Obamacare, proffers his delusions of recent American history before heading off for his weekly meeting with his anger management counselor:

The main thing that changed between then [40 years ago] and now,Instead, is that rabidly right-wing billionaires started throwing many millions of dollars into politics, forming and funding groups like the Federalist Society, which have managed to assert their will. They represent about the same 30 percent they represented back when Barry Goldwater won the GOP nomination. It’s just that now they’re organized and lavishly backed, whereas before they weren’t. In the 1960s, Nino Scalia would’ve ended up teaching at Notre Dame law school (where he belonged)—a crackpot speaker on a marginal rubber-chicken circuit that mainstream America could have blissfully ignored, instead of sitting on the highest court in the land imposing his 16th-century will on the rest of us.

And so: If we get a 5–4 ruling against the Affordable Health Care act or any part of it, this is the context to keep in mind. It will be another in a series of ferociously ideological one-vote-margin decisions from the court that we do not need history’s perspective to decide is far and away America’s most ideological.

(June 21, 2012)

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