Salon

Newly minted Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is doing his part to pre-blunt President Obama’s expected legacy outlining State of the Union address tonight, arguing that the president, whom he called “a dogmatic ideologue,” deserves exactly zero credit for the recovering American economy that added 292,000 jobs in the last month of 2015.

“Wages are stagnant,” Ryan argued to reporters Tuesday morning, undercutting the strength of America’s economic rebound from the more than 400,000 jobs lost a month in early 2009 when the president assumed office. “46 million people are still living in poverty today, among the highest poverty rates in a generation,” the speaker continued.

Eager to stretch her fifteen minutes of 2015 fame into the new year, Kim Davis, America’s sweetheart symbol of how very oppressed white Christian heterosexuals are, is going to attend Obama’s final State of the Union address. Now, how did she wrangle that one?

Kentucky county clerk Davis, you will recall, became a future trivia question answer back in September when she decided she it would cool to buck the Supreme Court and refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, on the grounds that it would go against her religious beliefs. For her convictions, the four-times married Davis spent five days in jail and earned the fawning endorsement of the religious right. Upon her release from jail, Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee couldn’t trip over themselves fast enough to get next to her. She followed up her stunt by getting back to work and petulantly announcing, “Any unauthorized license that they issue will not have my name, my title or my authority on it. Instead, the license will state that they are issued pursuant to a federal court order.” She was back in court in November, losing her latest appeal to deny her fellow Americans their constitutional rights.

Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign has excited progressives and socialists alike in a way that’s unparalleled in modern American history. So far, however, Hillary Clinton has been able to draw substantial support from people who are sympathetic to Sanders’s views and his record, but believe that Clinton is the most electable candidate in the general election against what is sure to be an ultraconservative goblin. However, as polls over the past couple of months have shown, Sanders is showing signs that he’s every bit as a electable as Clinton — and when matched up against certain Republican candidates, he’s polling even better than she is.

We have reached the stage of the presidential primary season when the group No Labels tries to pretend it is an actual force in Washington, and not just a silly vanity project for a bunch of rich people making a fetish object of the words “centrism” and “bipartisanship.”

On Monday, No Labels announced that six presidential candidates had signed onto its Problem Solver Promise. This is a gimmicky pledge stating that if elected, the candidate will start working with a bipartisan Congressional group on one of four items within 30 days of Inauguration Day next January. The items are defined broadly and generically enough that promising to work on legislation for one of them is a little bit like promising to use the bathroom within a couple of hours of eating dinner. It’s not so much a goal to strive for as it is an inevitability.

The Republican presidential race is amplifying everything wrong with the party. Led by self-promoting hucksters like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, it’s not exactly a showcase of the best and brightest the GOP has to offer. The serious candidates have been overwhelmed by the volume and gas of the “outsiders.” This plays well among the base, but it’s damaging the GOP’s national brand.

Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House, is aware of this problem, and he’s trying to counteract it. Over the weekend, Ryan spoke with several GOP presidential hopefuls (excluding Trump and Cruz) at the Kemp Foundation poverty summit in Columbia, South Carolina. According to Politico, Ryan’s message was clear: “He wants the Republican Party to be an ‘agenda party, a solutions party, an ideas party, so that we can make our case, not based on personality, but based on ideas to the country. Because that’s the kind of election we want to win.’”

“It’s twelve noon in London, seven AM in Philadelphia, and around the world it’s time for: Live Aid ….”

On July 13, 1985, David Bowie would take the stage at Wembley Stadium as part of the Live Aid benefit concert. Bowie would take the stage around 7:20 p.m. in London, falling in between Queen (who, remember, had just ended their set with that incredible version of “We Will Rock You”/“We Are The Champions”) and The Who.

But you’d never know it from the way the man casually strode onto the stage, his light gray suit not even displaying the tiniest wrinkle despite being out and about in it all day, topped by a formidable blond pompadour that would defy heat, humidity, and the earth’s gravitational pull. As his band hit the intro to “TVC-15,” Bowie went to the front of the stage and with a giant smile, acknowledged the crowd. Crisply and exactly on cue, he grabbed the mic and dove head first into the song. He would swagger and smirk and sway his hips from side to side. Not letting Bono be the only one to get away with stalking the stage, Bowie would hop down onto the platform below the monitors and work the crowd from end to end, heading stage left specifically to acknowledge a flag adorned with the lightning bolt Aladdin Sane image.

“I greatly admire the skill and aplomb with which you conduct our foreign policy,” wrote Henry Kissinger in a 2012 letter to “the Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton.” The compliment was included as a handwritten postscript added to the printed letter.

The Feb. 7 letter, which was released in a batch of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is a request that she help declassify documents from Kissinger’s time as secretary of state, which he says constitute “a unique record of a critical period in American foreign policy.”

You can argue whether Twitter played it right with Milo Yiannopoulos, Brietbart’s notoriously inflammatory tech editor. Just do freedom of speech a favor and don’t call it censorship.

Yiannopoulos is well known around social media for his fierce advocacy of the trolls of GamerGate — who hide behind the phrase “ethics in gaming journalism” to harass and abuse women on Twitter and elsewhere with relative impunity. A profile for Fusion last fall described him as “utterly charming” in person — despite being “the ultimate troll.” In it, he stated that “My natural disposition is a satirist and a comic. I like to entertain and to please people.” And he added that at a certain point in his career he decided, “I didn’t like me very much and so I created this comedy character. And now they’ve converged.”

Earlier Monday, the Supreme Court listened to oral arguments for Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case that could quite possibly lead to the death of unionization in the public sector as we know it. And if the first impressions of those who were in attendance are anything to go by, one of American society’s last bulwarks against neoliberalism is very likely about to crumble