When I was a child, I became fascinated by the Interstate Highway System. On family trips, I would sit in the backseat with my Rand McNally road atlas, carefully charting the passage of each town, exit, and rest stop. At home, I would spend hours pouring over the maps of all 50 states, memorizing the numbering system and dreaming of one day travelling on each and every Interstate across the country.

We’ve been here before in Arizona. And this could end the same way.

Grow up, baby Baldwin!

Jeff Shesol , a former speechwriter for President Clinton, with this book, becomes one of our leading non-academic American historians, following his previous book on the tangled relationship between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Here he examines the attempt by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to “pack” the Supreme Court by making new appointments even in the absence of the retirement or death of current members of the Court. It was, of course, provoked by the adamant opposition of the Court—led by the four conservatives known as the “Four Horsemen” (of the apocalypse] who, by gaining the vote of either the Chief Justice, Charles Evans Hughes, or Justice Owen Roberts could control the Court’s decision making—to major programs of the New Deal. Key programs of the New Deal were unceremoniously declared to be unconstitutional as beyond congressional power, and others were in a state of virtual suspension for fear of the same fate. Some of the decisions, most notably the one shooting down the “blue eagle” of the NRA, were no doubt quite popular, as the NRA had become discredited among large swathes of the population going well beyond conservative critics of the New Deal. Other programs, though, were at the heart of the New Deal program and seemingly threatened proposed legislation, including, say, the Wagner Act that would serve to empower labor unions against their employers.

The heart of the problem of the school lunch program is the USDA. Why didn’t Jamie Oliver talk about that more?

The big outrage de jour making the rounds in the media currently is the porn scandal at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The problem was born and matured under Bush and Cox, it is the fact that it is symptomatic for the emaciation and gutting of the SEC which occurred at their hands and express direction.

Fox News is still betting that you can fool some of the people all the time. And it appears to be working. Jamie Dimon can still knock back cocktails with John Boenher and watch Fox without feeling the slightest bit threatened by the tea parties.

There are predators, and then there are enablers.

It doesn’t matter if we are talking about child sexual abuse committed by Roman Catholic priests, deceptive Wall Street bankers, or DOJ-sanctioned torture. The game being played right now is the same, in all three venues: avoid accountability.

A young Army Major’s Masters thesis is making the rounds. Some believe his essay presages the persecution of Christans by the anti-Christ Obama. Others see in his thinking a message that goes beyond the dangers of Christian millennialism and touches upon the perils our country encounters by endorsing or cursing any fundamentalism, without engaging the issues through clear thinking.

Even a spoon-fed GOP steno machine can’t be totally incurious, can he?