The theme this week is Republicans Bad and Good. In a spasm of relative generosity, I’m only going to name one Bad Republican, and overbalance this by naming two Good Republicans.

I swear whenever these Republican knobs start yobbing off about how poor people just need to learn to work hard, I think YOU FIRST ASSHOLE. I doubt any of them have ever hauled anything heavier than a double scotch, but boy are they eager to stand watch with a whip while the little children pick in the fields and scrub in the hallways.

On the rather surreal occasion of the opening of something solemnly called the George W. Bush “Library,” I was inexorably drawn not to my personal Bush Library of 92 infuriating volumes, but the somewhat smaller 60 or so in the Nixon section.  As I listened to snippets of Village homilies and President Obama predictably joshing chummily about the “clubhouse,”  I was reminded of Jonathan Schell’s masterful recounting of the Watergate era, The Time of Illusion. 

It’s bad enough that Iowa has a district (not my district thank goodness) represented by the stupid and loathsome Steve King.

But the determination of several Republicans in the Iowa Legislature to do their impression is the kind of thing that is bound to keep the GOP on the cutting edge of social issues — in that they will bleed badly from them.

Those “clever” Republicans have finally gotten to the bottom of things about Benghazi by doing nothing more than figuring out who the most likely Democratic nominee in 2016 is going to be.

The timing couldn’t be better. Just hours before the Judiciary Committee of the Rhode Island state Senate is scheduled to vote on the marriage equality bill (S38), the Senate Republic Caucus has announced their unanimous support for marriage equality.

The last day for the public to write (hopefully not) in futility their comments is today.

So go here — keystonecomments@state.gov — if you wish to file your resistance.

Edward Luce’s book has been widely praised as carefully balanced and filled with evocative analysis and reportage. With a cast of dozens of academic, business and governmental thinkers, it wrestles with America’s relative economic decline, how the global economy is increasingly siphoning away America’s ability to innovate and manufacture, and a wide range of U.S. policy failures from education to healthcare to reinventing government. Too often Internet-entranced readers like me look for distillations to digest quickly, rather than dwell on the fascinating interviews, anecdotal treasure chest, and hard-nosed analyses in Mr. Luce’s detailed yet highly entertaining book.

Can science explain matters this dark?

If there’s a pile of money to be picked over in American politics, whether it’s Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996, Rupert Murdoch’s wallet in this century, or the RNC’s ten-million dollar effort to re-brand itself for Latino voters, you can bet toe-sucking whoremonger Dick Morris will be nearby peddling a solution, ready to hoover up the cash.