Heck, for most of history, it wasn’t even a speech! From Jefferson to Taft, the norm was a written message to Congress, along the lines of a really long budget report. Only when Woodrow Wilson realized he could use the mass media to turn the State of the Union into a rallying point for his agenda did this dumb…

Congress has no right to weigh in, actually. “The Congress... on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, SHALL CALL a convention for proposing amendments.” It’s non-optional. They HAVE to do it, as soon as 34 states demand it. Congress just gets to decide whether states will ratify the…

Juanita Broaddrick, Eileen Wellstone, Paula Jones, Elizabeth Ward, Christy Zercher, Sandra Allen-James, and Kathleen Wiley have all alleged, at one time or another, to have had non-consensual sexual contact with Bill Clinton. That’s seven — six if you discount Ward (who never made a public accusation).

As Nate Silver keeps saying, at this stage in a 16-candidate race, favorability ratings tell you a good deal more about a candidate’s national viability than their first-choice polling toplines. (Toplines become a bit more valuable when they include a second-choice fallback for each respondant.) You cannot treat a…

Huh? Those are four of the most popular candidates among the base. Here’s PPP’s favorable/unfavorable ratings results for each of the surviving candidates among national GOP primary voters (“the base”), dated December 16th, from least to most popular:

Thing is, even if there’s a bunch of skeletons in Rubio’s closet and it turns out he’s a corrupt preening politicking serial liar... he’ll be *running against Hillary*, who has a reputation for being that to the nth degree, so it won’t be a particularly effective line of attack against him.

I mean, he’s not wrong about Bill. Just a flaming hypocrite (in at least three separate dimensions) to be the one pointing it out.

I’ve lived here my entire life and have literally never heard of this show. How many viewers does it have? Six?

“As long as it is totally legal...”

Hm. I also came out as -0.4 Democrat, which is interesting, because I am a far-right Republican who supports Personhood Amendments and whose favorite Supreme Court justice is Clarence Thomas.

Jezebel’s a pretty liberal site. Go to a conservative site of roughly equal quality — say, Breitbart — and you’ll find the mirror image of this thread.

I’ve noticed this phenomenon a few times in the past few years. Highly anticipated installment in a franchise comes out.

Yeah, say what you will about Ted Cruz, but he’s not a neo-Nazi like a good chunk of Europe’s ultra-Right.

Yeah. The federal government does have supreme authority over matters of immigration, so OP is right about that. But the federal government has passed a number of immigration laws that at least *appear on the surface* to say that the President is not allowed to do exactly the thing President Obama tried to do with…

I don’t agree with the way it attacks catastrophic-care policies. If you want to have a comprehensive plan, sure, that should be an option available to you, but those of us who think insurance is mainly there to pay catastrophic costs (while we pay our routine costs out-of-pocket) should have also been allowed to keep…

He’s still tough on Republicans. See his Ted Cruz shindig?

Imagine if conservatives applied the “don’t watch actors who believe things that offend me” standard to film and TV stars! Wouldn’t have anything left to watch. Progressive privilege does it again.

I know you are, but what am I?

I am genuinely baffled that anyone could not know the answer to this question, but I’ve seen it several places in the past 24 hours, and so many of the answers seem to revolve around some kind of “Puritans love punishing people” fantasy that I feel I may be of some use here. Here are some arguments:

Problem: documents were fake. Documents were not authenticated. Journalists lied about whether they had been authenticated. Journalists did not do a single one of a dozen things they might have done to verify the documents. Journalists were not doing their jobs; journalists were doing hatchet job on a political enemy.…