National

Here is an update on the candidate filings, in chart form. First, the big news this week is that Christine O'Donnell is not a fan of getting her hand slammed in a car door. To steal from a friend on Facebook, car doors across the nation distanced themselves from this association with the failed 2010 and 2008 and 2006 GOP Senate candidate from Delaware. Seriously, the news is that O'Donnell won't run for office in 2014. I wept a little last night, knowing that the traffic spikes Delaware Liberal receives whenever Christine makes national news will not occur this year. Oh well, the sacrifices we make for not having our state represented by a witch.

The Republican Party cannot win a national election, but it is unified and dedicated to red-fanged political nihilism. The Democratic Party is too infested with collaborators (Yes I'm talking about you John Carney) and corporate sell outs (Hello Senators Carper & Coons !) to be an effective counterweight to the idiocy. That is the new normal. America had a nice run. It is all over now.

1) Joe Biden has a son named Hunter. 2) Hunter just got a big payday from a Ukrainian gas company on account of his famous last name. (Not that he needs the dough.) 3) Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. 4) People in other countries, like France and Germany, think it looks bad that Hunter took that job because President Obama is currently contending with some bullshit currently going down between Ukraine and Russia. 5) People in other countries, like France and Germany and every other country in the world except North Korea, pay more attention to world events than we do. 6) Some people in this country who are paid to care about what people in Europe think say that Hunter Biden's new job clashes with the U.S. "narrative" that we are all about international law and human rights - and not about taking everybody's oil and natural gas. 7)There is no number seven.

This just doesn't get old. It is completely glorious that all of these barriers to same sex marriage are falling like dominoes. Today, Pennsylvania's ban on same sex marriage was struck down by a Federal judge :

Michael Tomasky says the Tea Party is not quite dead yet:

Tonight, the tea party is going to lose some elections. Its Senate candidates in Kentucky and Georgia are going to lose—and lose really, really badly in at least in Kentucky. The theme of the night on cable (and for the balance of the week really) will be the death of the tea party. Everybody’s waiting with a safety net, as Elvis Costello (nearly) sang, but I say don’t bury them ’cuz they’re not dead yet. While it’s true that the majority of tea-party candidates are losing, something else has been going on more under the radar, smartly picked up on recently by Jamie Fuller of The Washington Post. A lot of Republican candidates are trying to finesse the establishment-tea party Maginot Line and be both things to all people. She writes, I believe accurately, that the clear goal of many candidates is “staying comfortable with the tea party while networking with the establishment on the side.” This certainly describes North Carolina’s Thom Tillis. He beat an explicitly tea party backed challenger, but Tillis is still deeply reactionary (eliminate the minimum wage entirely, he once suggested!), he backed the Cruz-led government shutdown, and he is distinguishable ideologically from tea party candidates only in that he’s not quite as wacko as the tea party guy was.

I was going to write a post parodying wingut reaction to Chipotle's decision to ask its patrons to not menace other patrons by brandishing their firearms. But winguts these days defy parody. Here is the hysterical whine of the "Tea Party Nation" on the topic: