National

Sens. Tom Coburn and Mary Landrieu gave their farewell addresses on the Senate floor Thursday and were praised by colleagues. Coburn gave an emotional address about the power of individual senators and the importance of compromise and oversight. He praised Sen. Tom Carper, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee where Coburn is ranking member. “He has been a phenomenal chairman. … We do not agree on everything, but the one thing we agreed on was that we were going to work together to solve problems.” Carper returned the praise, citing the movement of cyber bills and others as a testament to his work. “Legislation is moving through this body and through the House this week — it is pretty amazing, — to strengthen our cyber defenses,” Carper said.

No comment.

A woman charged with shooting and killing her ex-husband and stepdaughter has strong connections to groups advocating for expanding open carry gun laws in Texas. Veronica Dunnachie was arrested and charged with shooting and killing her ex-husband and step daughter. Dunnachie's Facebook page includes photos of her engaged in open carry firearm advocacy activities.

Lower gas prices and their continued fall seems to indicate that President Obama will have a much better 2015 than 2014, or so the Wall Street Journal thinks.

Low oil prices now appear likely to be with us deep into next year, at least, and they are shaping up as a win-win for the president. It’s hard to imagine a single development that carries so many upsides and so few downsides. The domestic economic benefits are obvious; more intriguing but less obvious are the ways low oil prices benefit American strategy around the world.

Perhaps the cowardly Democrats in the General Assembly can use this opportunity to fix our damn roads now. Now, someone said this upon signing the UN Convention on Torture:

“The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of [this] Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today. The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’ Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

That someone was President Ronald Reagan. He says that each state party, i.e. each nation that has entered into the UN Convention Treaty on Torture, is required to either prosecute torturers or extradite them to other countries for prosecution. Thus, President Ronald Reagan has called for the prosecution of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and if we don't do it, some other more exceptional nation than the United States must.

Tom Carper spent a lot of time campaigning form Mary Landrieu. Has his hard work purchased any goodwill? I doubt it. My bet is that Carper was duped, but that appears to be his thing.

“Senate Democrats plan to squeeze every last drop out of their majority, threatening to extend the lame duck to approve key nominees of President Barack Obama before turning over Senate control to Republicans in January. If they hold their caucus together, Democrats can unilaterally prevail and approve Vivek Murthy to be surgeon general, Sarah Saldana to lead Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Carolyn Colvin to be Social Security administrator, as well as nine judicial nominees … Democrats may need all their members to stick around to win tough votes, including Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who lost her seat on Saturday and has missed all of this week’s votes so far.”

Because the Keystone XL pipeline failed to pass, and because contraception is now the same thing as abortion in the deranged minds of Republicans, House GOPers pushed to attach a provision to the government funding bill that would let some employers opt out of covering contraception for employees. Senator for Life, Tom Carper took this move as a positive step toward Republican "reciprocity" and a demonstration of the GOP's willingness to be bipartisan.

Massimo Calabresi frames the debate over the report:

What effect will assigning blame have? The CIA says it is so burned by the EIT program that it is permanently out of the business of interrogation and Dianne Feinstein, the hawkish head of the Senate Intelligence committee, says that’s fine. The purpose of her report, she says, is to ensure such a program is never again acceptable to Americans. But plenty of others, from ex-CIA officer Jose Rodriguez, to former Vice President Dick Cheney, to former CIA chief Michael Hayden, say the program should be available for use if there is another major attack on the U.S. Even Obama’s CIA chief says only that the EIT program is not now “appropriate,” suggesting it might be in other circumstances. Ultimately, the report’s value lies in answering that simple question: should we ever do it again?

Republicans are for torture. That is what they are saying when they attack the release of the report while at the same time defending the actions of the torturers employed by the US government on the orders of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. And their answer to that question from Mr. Calabresi is "Absolutely." And that is because they have no morals. No conscience. The truly disturbing thing about this report is not the revelations of what they did in our name, but how many Americans will just shrug, or join the Republican critics. Come inside to read the report.

A new CNN/ORC poll finds 50% of Americans “believe Republican control of both chambers of Congress will be bad for the country, and a majority say it will in fact cause more gridlock in Washington.” Further, 68% of Americans polled say the GOP isn’t cooperating enough with President Obama, while 57% say it’s Obama who’s not cooperating enough with the GOP. And 100% of me is sick and tired of an American public that expects bipartisan cooperation. Liberals and conservatives, represented by Democrats and Republicans, respectively, don't agree on much, and the public either needs to stop expecting them to agree, or they should stop electing divided government.

From TEDDY WAYNE:

Paradoxes Contradictions Voting against your own self-interest