Day and Night by M. C. Escher hangs at the M. C. Escher Museum in The Hague, Netherlands. It was made from two wood blocks and black ink. At the bottom center, two roads meet at a 90-degree angle. To the left, we see fields, farm buildings and a windmill, and a canal from the river. There is a town to the north of the canal with a bridge over the river, leading to another group of roads, fields and canals. This is the day side. To the right, we see the same things, only on this side it is night. These parts of the print are symmetrical.

In which Mediaite’s managing editor Colby Hall of Pop-Up Video fame is taken to task for enabling the right wing Wurlitzer’s fact-free reporting — now, with Hall’s hurt feelings on display in comments.

The teabaggers approach the Constitution with much the same level of attention and intellectual rigor that the religious right applies to the New Testament.

It’s kind of amusing to hear right wingers insisting that the border just hasn’t been taken care of the way they would take care of it if only they were in charge. Above is one picture taken this last week from a raft on the Rio Grande, the river that separates the two countries. There in the distance where the river disappears in the picture, one side is one country, and the other side is the other. This is what the scene has been since farther back than the ages of time. Also, this is how it was when Republicans controlled the same areas.

There are dozens of excellent books on the subject of climate change, dominated heavily by texts examining the scientific underpinnings of our current knowledge about how climate systems work, and looking into what we might expect in the future. Many focus on environmental changes, threats to wildlife and biodiversity, and the public health implications of a hotter world. But Gwynne Dyer’s book “The Climate Wars” takes a rather unique approach to the subject, delving into the geopolitical implications of a rapidly destabilizing climate. Drawing heavily on interviews with a wide range of experts, as well as his own history, military and foreign policy expertise, Dyer examines how certain countries, both rich and poor, might respond to climate change, and details the stresses that every nation will face, regardless of their military might or last-minute attempts to build resilience to climate disruption.

Now, both characters in this drama will have new books to sell soon. But the stunning lack of irony, or self-assessment, on Sarah Palin’s part continues to amaze. Do she and her show make this privacy point knowing full well that McGinniss will have a claim against them, thus bumping up the buzz? Or does she simply not get the point? Or do they not care, since McGinniss is in her world a lower form of life, known as ‘other people?’

The Washington Post and the Obama administration have been busy telling us that it’s legal to kidnap people and send them to countries that torture. They may call it “renditioning” to nations that use “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but a new book details what this means in English.

Simply put, if we choose delay over action any longer on this issue, this planet will be a very different place in a very short time frame.

One of my first observations about the defeat of California’s Proposition 19 was how important turnout demographics were to the final outcome.

While I will need to wait for official final turnout numbers from the California Secretary of State to determine what impact Prop 19 had on youth turnout, it is clear from the available data that the initiative didn’t bring out young voters in the levels they normally do for presidential elections (as opposed to midterms).

While the national press has been focused on counting Democrats and Republicans in the next Congress, they are missing what was a preview of the kind of political fighting we’re going to see in the next two years: anonymous donors funneling large sums of money through 501(c)4 organizations to hide their activities from view. In the battle over California’s Prop 23 — a proposal to repeal CA’s landmark 2006 global warming law — that’s exactly what happened.

For a preview of what we’re sure to see on a large scale in the next two years, I’d like to introduce you to a small little group called the Adam Smith Foundation . . .