A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep

Lately there’s been this drip-drip-drip of posts in my newsfeed that are — let’s be honest — rooted in racism. The slanted news articles, you know the ones. This one time a black person benefited at the expense of a white person, evidence of widespread “reverse racism!” Drip. This one black cop shot an unarmed white man but nobody cares because white people are discriminated against! Drip. A black person somewhere did something bad therefore it’s reasonable to fear all black people everywhere! Drip. Or the memes about black rioting. Drip. Or the absurdly emotional defenses of all police officer actions, even the ones that are demonstrably inexcusable. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. They aren’t posted by people who think of themselves as racists or who condone explicit racism, but they do reveal an inexcusable myopia about the biases we all have and a disturbing lack of empathy for people of color. Although I have never been one to unfriend people who disagree with my world vi

As an atheist, I say "Merry Christmas" to everyone because I want to perpetuate the idea that Christmas is a non-Christian secular American holiday equally applicable to members of all faiths. Incidentally, that reasoning is exactly why it was Christians who once preferred the greeting "Happy Holidays" so as to preserve the religious meaning of Christmas. The so-called "war on Christmas" is, of course, nothing more than a ratings-driven push to gin up outrage, hatred, and   division -- which is pretty antithetical to the values of Christmas, whether it's my secular version or a follower of Jesus Christ's religious version. But this Christmas remember that when you insist on saying "Merry Christmas" to someone regardless of his or her religious beliefs, you are participating in my godless heathen agenda! Merry Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight!

Knowing that I will soon be leaving Congress, I made this flowchart today to help my colleagues predict in my absence whether or not Speaker Boehner has the votes necessary to pass any given bill. The flowchart was right during Boehner's "Plan B" tax proposal in 2012, right again during the battle over the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization, right again during the 2013 shutdown, right during the farm bill debate, right during the transportation spending bill, right during... Well, you get the idea. UPDATE: The flowchart also correctly predicted the outcome of the DHS funding showdown in spring 2015 over the president's immigration executive orders. If House Republicans could have controlled themselves and just gone after the 2014 EO (DAPA) related to the parents of legal residents, they could probably have peeled off a number of mushy Democrats. But they couldn't resist the siren call of full crazy and passed a funding bill that also invalidated t