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And the GOP weeps.

Stop laughing and be afraid.

Cheech and Chong — Santa Claus and His Old Lady.

Upon the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t  Tell, there has been much rejoicing. And fair enough. It is a landmark civil rights victory, and so forth, of the sort you don’t see every day. But then, perhaps it is wrong, or even worse, Bad Manners, to see the end of DADT as a Victory Over [...]

Another Roman Catholic bishop — Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix — has revoked the right of a hospital to call itself Catholic over a dispute as to whether a life-saving procedure that results in the end of a pregnancy can ever be acceptable.

Thankfully, the professionals of St. Joseph’s Hospital stood up to the bishop. But this won’t be the last time a hospital is threatened by the hierarchy of the Catholic church, and that should worry everyone, regardless of your beliefs.

The re-apportionment of congressional districts connected to the 2010 census will result in several Democratic-leaning states, such as New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York, losing House seats. The loss of congressional members, also means these reliably blue states now have fewer votes in the Electoral College. The result could be that the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire gain even more importance in deciding who the next president will be.

The new Republican House rules proposal is out, and people are rightly guffawing about the vow to read the Constitution on the House floor at the beginning of the session. But if silliness like this is the worst that the GOP House can do, we’ll all be happy to get out of the next two years intact.

Making the debt limit vote separate prevents the ability for it to be a less palatable vote for Republicans. It appears to prevent a merging of the budget resolution to fund the government in March and the debt limit. So it makes that a separate hostage-taking event.

And no matter what one thinks the correct stance is, this seems to be all about Obama having missed his opportunity to take a correct and defensible legal stance in 2009 (thanks Rahm), but also refusing to take a stance he’ll need to fight for going forward. Now, frankly, of all the political fights Obama refuses to fight, I suspect an assessment that this is now an unwinnable fight might, for once, be accurate (which is different than agreeing that it was unwinnable in summer 2009). In other words, his assessment than an attempt to head Bud McKeon off at the pass may indeed be morally preferable if legally suspect. But all the claims about EOs stopping short of institutionalizing a permanent system of indefinite detention also ignore the ways that doing this via EO is at the least legally troublesome and may be far worse in the long run.

Greg Miller of the Washington Post informs us Wednesday morning that the “CIA has launched a task force to assess the impact of the exposure of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks”. The group is officially called the Wikileaks Task Force, but, as Miller informs us, “it’s mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: WTF”. In a similar vein, we learn that Bank of America also is preparing its mature response to indications that it is to be the next target of Wikileaks. BofA’s response is to buy “hundreds of abusive domain names for its senior executives and board members”.