New Years Eve Open Thread [12.31.14]

New Years Eve Open Thread [12.31.14]

Steve Benen counters the narrative that 2014 was a bad year for the country and President Obama specifically:
This was the year the economy improved to its strongest level in over a decade and the Affordable Care Act succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. It was the year the president scored foreign policy breakthroughs with Cuba and China, and advanced a landmark immigration policy. This was the year Obama filled much of the federal judiciary with his nominees, deftly handled some important crises, freed American prisoners in North Korea, and sharply reduced the number of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. It’s also the year the president saw his approval rating jump, bringing him in line with Reagan’s support at a comparable point in his presidency. I don’t doubt that Obama wishes the midterm elections had gone the other way, but Beltway conventional wisdom notwithstanding, maybe 2014 wasn’t such a disaster for the president after all?
Tuesday Open Thread [12.30.14]

Tuesday Open Thread [12.30.14]

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), the No. 3 Republican in the House, addressed a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in 2002, the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Scalise made his remarks to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, which was founded two years earlier by David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana politician… It was unclear what the revelation means for Mr. Scalise’s future in the House leadership. Speaker John A. Boehner declined to comment on the reports.”
Uh. We knew who David Duke was in 2002, and if you didn't know who he was, or you didn't know that "European-American Unity and Rights Organization" is straight up code for the KKK, then you are too stupid to draw a salary at any level of government and you must be forced out immediately. The truth here is Scalise is a racist white supremacists, as are a lot of conservatives down in the South, most of home are now Republicans. So it was quite natural for him to speak to people with like minds.
Monday Open Thread [12.29.14]

Monday Open Thread [12.29.14]

“The mayor is not in any way to be treated with people turning their backs. It doesn’t matter whether you like the mayor or you don’t like the mayor, you have to respect the mayor’s position.” — Rudy Giuliani, turning back from his fanning the flames over the last week. But according to his and the Police's logic, he is criticizing the Police negatively, and thus he must condemned and destroyed immediately. Remember, we are a police state where the police are always, always right, and all criticism of them is always, always treasonous.

Monday Daily Delawhere [12.29.14]

2013 Progressive of the Year Sarah McBride now has a quadcopter drone with a Go Pro camera and posted a couple of awesome aerial photos, like this one of Rockford Tower in Wilmington. So now drone aerial photos are my new favorite thing. And there is no truth to the rumors that Ms. McBride purchased the quadcopter to carry out surgical drone strikes on enemy targets in Sussex County.

Christmas Eve Open Thread [12.24.14]

“The U.S. economy posted its strongest growth in more than a decade during the third quarter, supported by robust consumer spending and business investment,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.0% in the third quarter… That was up from the second quarter’s growth rate of 4.6% and the strongest pace since the third quarter of 2003.”
No single Republican anywhere in this country has uttered a single word about the mountain of good economic news recently. That silence speaks volumes.
The Greatest Hits of 2014.

The Greatest Hits of 2014.

So it is the time of year when we all look back on the year that has past, and compile top ten lists, or something. So I started to compile a list of the top DL posts of 2014. But what's the criteria we are judging by? Page views? Number of comments? Best Subject Matter? Most controversial? The last two criteria area are subjective, and usually if a post is controversial or a highly "viral" subject matter, like this year with charter and priority schools and Chip Flowers, they tend to already generate the most comments and page views. El Somnambulo has already posted his Good, Bad and the Ridiculous column this morning, and that focused substantively on the crazy Delaware political stories this year. So I am going to strictly follow the page view criteria. So, excluding the main and index pages, and this post by Jason330 in 2012 about Bacon numbers, which, for some reason, gets tons of views yearly (probably because of a good Google search term), here are the most viewed stories by Delaware Liberal contributors this year....