National

According to Politico, it's because Harry Reid wants him there. Doesn't want him giving any more stuff away to the Rethugs:

“None of the deals Biden has struck have aged well from the perspective of the Democratic Caucus,” said one Senate Democratic official aware of Reid’s face-to-face insistence that Biden be excluded. "In December, McConnell went around Reid — and straight to Biden — to get a better arrangement for Republicans.

A Republican congressman gives his a history lesson:

The congressman began with an anecdote from the Civil War. "I would liken this a little bit to Gettysburg, where a Confederate unit went looking for shoes and stumbled into Union cavalry, and all of a sudden found itself embroiled in battle on a battlefield it didn't intend to be on, and everybody just kept feeding troops into it," the congressman said. "That's basically what's happening now in a political sense. This isn't exactly the fight I think Republicans wanted to have, certainly that the leadership wanted to have, but it's the fight that's here."

So the GOP is the Confederacy, about to be slaughtered in battle.

Where are Delaware's Republican grownups? Doesn't Delaware even have a functioning GOP anymore? Take a look at Charlie Copeland's official DEGOP Chair blog page. Ridiculous. Copeland is particularly craven given the politics of his father, a Republican who was instrumental in bringing Planned Parenthood to Delaware. What ever happened to the sane/insane divide in the party. I haven't heard a peep about the GOP's outrageous and unpatriotic brinksmanship from ANY Delaware Republican. Kovach? Lopez? Are you guys the future leaders of a political party or what? Man up for God's sake. While the "moderates" cower in silence, many Delaware Republicans live in the same self-imposed intellectual isolation that Ted Cruz inhabits. It is an intellectual ghetto in which the only voices are extremist charlatans who say there’s no risk associated with default. Because they never hear the thoughts of alleged Republican moderates like Copeland or Kovach, they honestly think that the government can structure payments so that the country’s creditors are held harmless. An alarming number of Republicans think this way, and that is to the DEGOP's eternal shame. The Delaware Republican Party "moderates" no doubt strut their level-headed reasonableness behind closed doors, but there are publicly complicit in allowing the GOP's dangerous fantasies to flourish. < / rant >

Once again I keep hearing that for Boehner to get himself out of this mess of his own creation, he will need some kind of face saving concession that he can take to his mouth breathers. However, if today is any indication, there will be no face saver for Boehner. Today was spent easily boxing Boehner into yet another corner of his own making, after the Speaker's unwise comments on Sunday that he did not have the votes for either a clean CR or a clean debt ceiling vote. The response from all united Democrats everywhere was obvious to all: Prove it. Hold the vote. Do it now. That was the mantra today. But Boehner, being the weakest and most strategically dumb Speaker in the history of the United States, can't do that, for, as everyone knows, both bills would pass. The only way out of this now for Boehner is for him to, pardon the expression, Ladies, man up. Take his medicine. Face the consequences. Allow votes on both clean bills, allowing both to pass. Yes, he will in all likelihood lose his job of Speaker as a result, but that is not our fault. It is his. If he does not do it, yes, he may remain Speaker, for a while. But being solely responsible for a continued government shutdown and then a debt default that plunges the nation in the Great Depression II, his name will go down in history as more infamous and loathsome than Herbert Hoover. And then the GOP will lose the House.

Let's say the Republican traitors refuse to raise the debt ceiling (and yes, my Republican friends, I consider that to be an act of treason against the United States for the Constitution of the United States requires you to see to it that debts of the country are paid). What does the President do then? I honestly don't know. But Professor Eric Posner reviews the ways Obama could justify unilaterally raising the debt ceiling.

Scalia is being killed in the real world for his crazy-ass interview with New York Magazine. I'm loving seeing coverage like this on blogs like TheSuperficial which is a high traffic entertainment oriented blog.

(The interview) has already produced a goddamn orgy of quotes from him claiming to having secret gay friends to repudiating his own moderations. So here’s my favorite part where in the year 2013, a man who holds one of the most powerful and influential posts in our government talks about what he thinks The Devil is up to these days instead of possessing people and pigs like he used to in real life.

I'm sure this will be appealed to God, who is the only judge Christopher recognizes.

Conclusion The judgment of the Superior Court is affirmed.

We hold that the term “conservator of the peace” in the 1776 Delaware Constitution and each successive Delaware Constitution has always been used only to describe a changing variety of public officials. That generic collective description has never defined the powers of any specifically named constitutional office holder. The Sheriff’s argument to the contrary is without merit.

In other words: Stop trying to be a cop and do the job you were hired to do you idiot.

While throwing money at the banking sector and big pharama haven't worked out - there is a business sector that can (very cheaply) drag Wilmington into a new golden age. David Byrne has what Wilmington needs.