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The Daily Show's Jon Stewart opened his show this Monday by taking on the hypocrites over at Faux "news" for their carping that President Obama and the left have supposedly "politicized" the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina this week and that it's of course, "too early" to have a discussion about gun control, or racism, or whatever else they'd prefer we not talk about because they don't want to offend their racist audience.

After showing a montage of the talking heads over there, ending with Sean Hannity saying this:

HANNITY: It's almost like a sickness that, you know, a tragedy happens, let's see how we can advance our narrative.

Stewart let him have it.

STEWART: Yes. It's a sickness. This rush to use tragedy to advance... your narrative. Combine that with an inability for self-examination, an almost comical degree of self-exculpatory rhetoric, flag pins, little bit of leg, and a complete immunity to irony -- you've got yourself a full blown case of Fox-abetes.

You know, they're amazing. They are amazing at what they do. Remind me of this past December when two New York City cops were tragically killed during a time when people were protesting police shootings of unarmed black men. Talk to me about the restraint Fox used in not advancing their narrative.

Cue the Fox yappers in full blown attack mode, claiming Mayor Bill de Blasio has blood on his hands and attacking President Obama for supposedly being the ones making racial tensions worse in New York.

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Okay, okay, late to the party and nobody cares anyway, but these commentaries amused me. Spencer Hall, at SBNation, on “the most unbelievable movie script ever made“:

… This Swiss guy is named Sepp Blatter. He somewhat stereotypically got his start at a watch company, and then turned his sights to running a corrupt sports nonprofit named FIFA that sold a giant soccer tournament that only happens once every four years, but involves the entire world…

The tournament (and a few others sponsored by the soccer organization) are popular enough to suck in money from everyone and everything imaginable: shoe companies, airlines, sports beverages empires, possibly evil giant Russian gas conglomerates, and television networks small and large. The Swiss guy made it all fantastically profitable at little cost to the soccer organization, often by getting host countries to build and run most everything for them. He made money.

The Swiss guy made a lot of money. He made a million dollars a year by his own accounts, though that number is believed to be much, much higher in reality. He made enough money to fund a feature-length movie about this organization, and to pay Tim Roth to play the corrupt Swiss guy despite bearing no resemblance to him whatsoever. He paid out bribes to maintain power, exacted bribes from those sports companies and countries desperate to host that huge tournament, and used all that solidarity and momentum to win elections, build bigger tournaments, and construct other things like a giant scary meeting room that looks exactly like the war room in Dr. Strangelove…

It goes on really well until someone gets very, very mad.

Correction: It goes well until a former United States President gets mad about one of those giant tournaments. The Swiss guy gives the giant tournament to a tiny desert nation named Qatar, which despite being tiny, infernally hot, not a traditional soccer power in any sense of the word, and covered in sand, is otherwise perfect for a giant tournament… One of those countries not in the running was the United States, and when the former American President hears this he reportedly breaks a mirror…

The aggrieved Americans begin a large and dedicated federal criminal investigation of the giant soccer organization using weird laws that allow them to basically arrest whomever they want as long as there is some money crossing American lines in an undeclared and untaxable way.…

Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Grantland, is older and therefore sadder about the whole mess:

… So much of our corruption is in plain sight these days. The events of the last decade lead invariably to the conclusion that in every booth on the midway every wheel is conspicuously rigged. For example, in the wake of the raids in New York and Zurich, several banks in the United Kingdom began reviews to see if they’d been used to put FIFA’s dirty money through the spin cycle. One of those banks was HSBC. In 2012, HSBC paid almost $2 billion to settle charges that it had laundered money for a number of international criminal enterprises. While the alleged crimes of FIFA are unprecedented in the context of the sports-entertainment industry, they are sadly typical of the way that international systems of corporate commerce and high finance operate…

Qatar, of course, represents a wide, clear window into the criminal depravity spawned by the corruption of soccer’s governing body and its corporate partners. Reports insist that the bidding process was crooked, which should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody at this point. But what has ensued since Qatar’s bid was accepted should, as the late Molly Ivins once put it, be enough to gag a maggot. Migrant laborers are held in virtual slavery to build the new venues in the tiny petro-state. One labor watchdog group estimates that 4,000 of these workers will die before all the stadia are built. Any sponsor associated with FIFA is engaging in accessorial conduct in regard to any of those deaths…

… But, significantly, the corporate partners are tippy-toeing around the swamp. Recent history tells us that expecting a strong stand on ethical behavior — which, in this case, would mean a strong stand against slave labor — is not something most major corporations remember how to do. For several decades, the same grab-it-all frenzy that overcame FIFA was encouraged in almost every aspect of the world economy and cheered on by many of the people who were on the business end of it when the whole thing came crashing down. All of the institutions that run our major sports were no exceptions to this rule. FIFA was only the most garish example. Nobody thinks they’re doing anything wrong as the whole world turns into Doha, and the whole world goes up for sale.

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Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio suggested in a recent interview that the push to legalize same-sex marriage represented a threat to the survival of Christianity. In a profile published on Tuesday, CBN’s David Brody pointed out that Rubio’s “deep faith drives public po...

Perhaps the "puke funnel" metaphor isn't quite extreme enough.

For a while, Hillary Clinton's critics thought the email story would be a clean, easy hit on the likely Democratic nominee. It's not turning out that way.

Kaveh Mousavi demolishes the controversy, such as it is, over Fifty Shades of Grey.  Seriously, he's said everything that needs to be said on the subject -- I don't have a word to add.

Police officers seriously injured a 57-year-old Indian man they stopped after a neighbor reported him acting suspiciously while walking near his son’s Alabama home. The man’s son, Chirag Patel, said officers threw his father to the ground during questioning, leaving him partially paralyzed and hospi...

Law enforcement officers dismissed right-wing rumors about an alleged Islamic terrorist camp in upstate New York. The Muslims of America are headquartered at the 70-acre “Islamberg” retreat near Onalaska in Lewis County, where the group has been accused of conducting paramilitary exercises and maint...

Rachel Maddow reports on President Obama's speech in the very red state of Idaho today, emphasizing the theme of national unity that was also part of his...

On counter-terrorism, care to guess which White House said, "We ought to avoid the language of religion"?

In his new memoir Silver Screen Fiend, Patton Oswalt recounts his multi-year “addiction to film.” Elbert Ventura appreciates that the comedian is “unsparing in evoking the condition of on-the-spectrum obsessiveness”:

Linda Holmes remarks that “one of the best things about Silver Screen Fiend is that Oswalt doesn’t always seem very likable in it”:

The easiest way to enjoy a memoir, at times, is when it makes a famous person seem like an awesome best friend you’d love to have. Patton Oswalt, on the other hand, in his own stories, can seem not just prickly, but full of explanations of things he’s learned to rise above:

hack comedy by people who are successful but untalented, inferior art, boring people, uncool venues (“giggle-shack” is his most devastating putdown). The book is not an argument for his personable nature, as books by famous people often are. …

It is, however, an interestingly aggressive, restless attempt – sometimes successful and sometimes less so – to get to the bottom of his own fascination with dark theaters and old movies, and how it dovetailed with his developing comedy career. The farther he gets from the theaters, and from the attempt to convey their grandeur and the grandeur of film itself, the better the book is.

David Brusie finds that the book “has its faults”:

The book’s structure isn’t always clear, which sometimes makes for an unwieldy read, and a 33-page appendix listing every movie he saw over four years, while interesting at a glance, ultimately feels like padding. But Oswalt’s ample writing talents push the narrative past these shortcomings (a section with no punctuation depicting Oswalt’s thoughts while bombing onstage is particularly vivid). His decision to write almost entirely in the present tense makes the memoir feel immediate and vital. …

The book’s resolution, which includes the birth of Oswalt’s daughter, makes clear that the story is a kind of fable about the dangers of immersion in any cultural interest. By the end, when Oswalt stumbles out of the dark and squints in the light of his new life, it’s enough to make any reader seek out the many films that made him hibernate in the first place.

In a recent interview about the book, Oswalt elaborated on one of the events that finally led him out of addiction – the release of Star Wars Episode I: Phantom Menace:

It’s not that it killed the addiction; it made me look at the addiction from such a different angle that it didn’t hold any power over me anymore. I’ll put it this way — I was the worst kind of movie fan. I’m the kind of guy who saw 6 movies a day, didn’t write any movies, didn’t make any movies, but then could be armchair quarterbacking on a movie that I had no hand in making.

Yes, I thought [Phantom Menace] was a failure, but the dude took a shot at it. It hit me that I was spending days and days and nights and nights with my friends, arguing back and forth about this film but this guy made a movie. Good or bad, he made a movie. He’s on a different relam than you.

From the December 9 edition of Fox News' The Five:

Previously:

The Fraudulent Media Campaign To Scandalize Obamacare's Passage

Fox Devoted 57 Segments To Manufactured ACA Scandal

With Jonathan Gruber Comments, Fox Searches For Its Next Benghazi

Mary Burke is the target of a last-minute campaign smear as the race for Wisconsin governor remains tight. Two former executives—both of whom just happen to be Republicans—of her family's company, Trek Bicycle, are claiming that Burke was forced out of a job with the company in the early 1990s, a claim the company strongly denies. But how did this story get going and gain traction? That's especially interesting:

An article by M.D. Kittle first ran Tuesday on the website of the Wisconsin Reporter, which is part of the conservative Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. In 2012, the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation donated $190,000 to help underwrite the website. The Bradley Foundation is headed by Michael Grebe, chairman of Walker's campaign committee.

Okay, then. A conservative outlet supported by a foundation run by Walker's campaign committee chair is the source of a last-minute attack on Walker's opponent in a tight race. Gee, that all looks extremely ethical and aboveboard. Especially in relation to the campaign of a governor already under investigation for using outside conservative groups more or less as extensions of his campaign. Burke's campaign is hitting back:

Sign up to make GOTV calls to Democratic voters in Wisconsin.

I'm sorry, I can't make phone calls, but I will chip in $3 to Daily Kos to help fuel Get Out The Vote efforts.

The fact that Walker supporters are bothering with a flimsy attack based on events more than 20 years old shows how close they think this race is. Democrats need to push hard to get out the vote for Mary Burke.

Shame on CNN, who has now fully morphed into Fox Lite. This pathetic effort to undermine Martin O'Malley's vocal stand for the children at the border is really irresponsible.

Here's what CNN reports:

Thousands of young undocumented migrants back to Central America, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley asked a top White House official that the children not be sent to a site that was under consideration in his home state, sources familiar with the conversation said.

"He privately said 'please don't send these kids to Western Maryland,'" a Democratic source told CNN. The heated discussion between O'Malley and White House domestic policy adviser Cecilia Munoz occurred during a phone call late Friday evening, sources familiar with the conversation added.

O'Malley doesn't deny he had a conversation, nor does he deny asking that they not be sent to one location in Maryland. But they might have worked a little harder to discover why he said that.

Start with this paragraph buried deep beneath the misleading lede:

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From the June 3 edition of Fox News' Outnumbered:

Previously:

Fox's Legal Analyst Andrew Napolitano Endorses Call For Obama's Impeachment Over Bergdahl Release

Five Years Of Conservatives Calling For Obama's Impeachment

They're at it again:

Eric Cantor is slamming the White House over the newly disclosed Benghazi email, saying it shows the Obama administration “misled” Congress and the American people on the attacks.

And:

Rep. Jason Chaffetz on Thursday blasted the Obama administration on Benghazi, calling it a “major, major scandal” and saying Jay Carney’s comments were “laughable.”

Chaffetz was speaking to Fox, which is devoting a good chunk of its airtime on Thursday to the House Oversight Committee's latest hearing on Benghazi. I've lost count, but I think the only thing House Republicans have spent more time on over the past two years is trying to repeal Obamacare, and just like with Obamacare, the only thing that's new about what Republicans are saying is the date on which they are saying it.

Case in point: Cantor and Chaffetz were both teeing off on an a White House email released yesterday written by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. The email was about preparing Susan Rice, who was then our U.N. Ambassador, for Sunday show appearances following the attack in Benghazi. Obviously, therefore, Benghazi was one of the topics addressed in the email. Specifically, Rhodes proposed that Rice use the same talking points that the CIA had already developed about protests in Cairo spreading to Benghazi.

Those talking points proved to be flawed, but as Dave Weigel spells out, there is absolutely nothing surprising nor new about the fact that the White House relied on the CIA talking points to brief Susan Rice. By any reasonable standard of logic or evidence, this is a nothingburger, but we're talking about House Republicans and their Benghazi obsession, so reasonable standards of logic and evidence are the first things to go out the window. Instead, we're left with the House Majority Leader accusing the president of having "orchestrated" a coverup and the guy who will be the next Darrell Issa saying the new email is a "major, major scandal."

The reality, of course, is that the only thing that's been orchestrated is the GOP's phony outrage over Benghazi. If there's a major scandal here, that's what it is.

8:25 AM PT: And Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa himself says what happened after Benghazi might be a crime ... committed by the White House:

“It’s disturbing, and perhaps criminal, that these documents were kept from the public. It comes in a week where the American people have learned that you cannot believe what the White House says…and you cannot believe what the president says,” Issa said at an Oversight hearing.

Oh, please. Darrell Issa doesn't believe that for a second. But if he does, he should act on his convictions and impeach the president. I dare him.

Hmm.

Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn said Thursday that he still supports the death penalty, even in light of the botched execution in his home state.

“I think it has a deterrent capability,” Coburn said on “Morning Joe,” while also acknowledging that he still doesn’t “like” capital punishment.

First, I would like to direct the nation's attention to the plain fact that we are debating whether and how best to kill people on something referred to as "Morning Joe." This is the sign of a declining empire. This is akin to when Rome chose lowering of the capital gains tax over continued scrubbings of the vomitoriums. We're debating our methods of killing people on Morning Joe. Again, I mean—it does tend to be a subject that comes up quite a lot in other guises. Second, is this like a Cliven Bundy thing, where if you believe something to be true, that makes it true?

Coburn, a physician, said the Oklahoma execution this week in which the inmate died after 43 minutes was the result of human error.

“Anytime you’re doing anything with the body, things can go wrong,” he said.

Good to know. Now if we could just find a senator-lawyer who could tell us that "things can go wrong" when convicting people of capital crimes in the first place, oopsie, spilled milk, etc., we might be getting somewhere.

Pressed on “Morning Joe,” Coburn conceded that the episode raises questions “about the death penalty and whether or not that, in and of itself, is appropriate and whether you can do that humanely.”

Wait, this horrific episode got even Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn contemplating on humaneness? That itself may count as a miracle. If you ever find yourself up for Catholic sainthood and need to write down your bonafides, tell the Church that one was your doing.

Lord Williams enters debate provoked by PM, saying UK is not a nation of believers, but neither is it full of dedicated secularists

Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has declared that Britain is no longer a nation of believers and that it has entered a “post-Christian” era.

Entering a debate triggered by David Cameron’s declaration before Easter that Britain should be “more confident about our status as a Christian country” and “more evangelical” about faith, Williams said that Britain was “post-Christian”, but not “non-Christian”.

Speaking in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Williams – now Lord Williams of Oystermouth – said it was important to “pick your way quite carefully” in the debate about the nation’s relationship with Christianity.

“If I say that this is a post-Christian nation, that doesn’t mean necessarily non-Christian. It means the cultural memory is still quite strongly Christian. And in some ways, the cultural presence is still quite strongly Christian. But it is post-Christian in the sense that habitual practice for most of the population is not taken for granted.

“A Christian nation can sound like a nation of committed believers, and we are not that. Equally, we are not a nation of dedicated secularists. I think we’re a lot less secular than the most optimistic members of the British Humanist Association would think.”

Professor Jim Al-Khalili, president of the British Humanist Association, was one of more than 50 public figures who signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph criticising Cameron’s comments about Britain being a Christian country. They said that, apart from in a “narrow constitutional sense”, there was no evidence to justify labelling Britain as a Christian state and that to assert otherwise ran the risk of fostering “alienation and division”.

In his interview, when pressed for a yes/no response to the question about whether Britain was a Christian country, Williams replied: “A Christian country as a nation of believers? No. A Christian country in the sense of still being very much saturated by this vision of the world and shaped by it? Yes.”

He also said that, in the future, awareness of Christianity might decline. “Given that we have a younger generation who now know less about this legacy … there may be a further shrinkage of awareness and commitment.”

But this could also lead to people discovering Christianity afresh, he said. “The other side is that people then rediscover Christianity with a certain freshness, because it’s not ‘the boring old stuff that we learnt at school and have come to despise’. I see signs of that, talking to youngsters … in school visits. There is a curiosity about Christianity.”

According an ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph, 56% of people say Britain is a Christian country, compared with 30% who say it is a non-religious society. Some 14% of respondents told ICM that they saw themselves as practising Christian, 38% said they were non-practising Christian, 41% non-religious, and 5% members of another faith.

Lady Warsi, the Foreign Office minister and minister for faith, told the paper that immigration was making Britain more Christian because “some of the biggest church-goers are people whose heritage is in Africa and the Caribbean”.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014

Why would WND dispatch Jerome Corsi to London to publish a series of reports on the trial of a conspiracy theorist? As is often the case with Corsi and WND, there's an utterly bizarre explanation: the guy on trial thinks President Obama's mother isn't his real mother.

After the nonsensical conspiracy that President Obama lacked a proper American birth certificate was finally put to rest when he released the long-form version of that document in 2011, birther conspiracy theorists have forged increasingly convoluted and bizarre allegations to try to keep the story alive. Right-wing fringe sites like WND -- which, not coincidentally, sells a wide range of birther swag at its online store -- have spent the years since the release of the long-form certificate desperately trying to breathe life back into the conspiracy. Based on things like a smudged stamp ink and a supposedly-hidden "smiley face" in the long-form certificate, writers like Corsi have declared the document to be a forgery (a ridiculous claim also endorsed by people like Donald Trump). 

Hand-in-hand with the conspiracy that Obama lacks or is hiding an authentic birth certificate, conspiracy theorists have also obsessed over the idea that Barack Obama Sr. is not the president's real father. Candidates for the "real father" have included Malcolm X, an unidentified "American black," "some Indonesian," and, most prominently, Communist poet Frank Marshall Davis. (The latter theory was the focus of an inane 2012 "documentary," which found fans in Corsi and Fox News contributor Monica Crowley.)

In a new wrinkle, WND has posted at least three articles this week shedding light on the claim that Stanley Ann Dunham is not Barack Obama's birth mother.

In an article filed earlier this week from London, Corsi highlighted the outlandish claims of Michael Shrimpton, "a middle-aged London barrister by profession and self-proclaimed intelligence expert." Shrimpton is currently awaiting trial in England for allegedly intentionally misleading the British government by falsely claiming terrorists planned to detonate a nuclear weapon during the 2012 Olympics that he claimed was stolen from a sunken Russian submarine. 

Cow manure, commonly used to fertilize vegetable crops, contains a high number of genes that can fuel resistance to antibiotics, a US study out Tuesday found.

These genes come from the cows’ gut bacteria, and while none have yet been found in superbugs that are infecting humans, researchers said the potential is real.

The research was done by scientists at Yale University, who sampled manure from a handful of dairy cows at a farm in Connecticut.

In those samples, they found 80 unique antibiotic resistance genes.

About three quarters were unfamiliar. Genetic sequencing showed they were only distantly related to those already known to science.

When applied to a lab strain of E. coli, the genes made the bacteria resistant to certain well-known antibiotics, including penicillin and tetracycline.

Researchers said they were surprised by the number of antibiotic resistance (AR) genes they found, based on just five stool samples from four cows.

However, they also noted that the levels were lower than what is seen in chickens, which are often fed four times as many antibiotics as cows — typically to promote growth.

“The diversity of genes we found is remarkable in itself considering the small set of five manure samples,” said Jo Handelsman, senior study author and microbiologist at Yale.

“But also, these are evolutionarily distant from the genes we already have in the genetic databases, which largely represent AR genes we see in the clinic.”

Further study is needed to probe whether cow manure may harbor a major reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes that could move into humans.

“This is just the first in a sequence of studies —- starting in the barn, moving to the soil and food on the table and then ending up in the clinic — to find out whether these genes have the potential to move in that direction,” Handelsman said.

The study appears in mBio, an open access online journal published by the American Society for Microbiology.

Funding for the research came from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the US National Institutes of Health.

[Cow via Shutterstock]

When Republicans in Wisconsin meet for their annual convention next month, one of the topics on the agenda will be whether the party supports seceding from the United States if necessary.

According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the Wisconsin Republican Party’s Resolutions Committee voted earlier this month in favor of a proposal that says the state GOP “supports legislation that upholds Wisconsin’s right, under extreme circumstances, to secede.”

Fringe Republicans managed to defeat more moderate members of the party who were hoping to reject the proposal at the April 5 meeting. The proposal was adopted on a split vote with only a few changes.

Delegates will get the final vote on whether the so-called “state sovereignty” resolution is included in the party platform at the convention in Milwaukee on May 2-4.

Gov. Scott Walker (R) recently said that the proposal did not align “with where most Republican officials are in the state of Wisconsin — certainly not with me.”

Last year, residents of Wisconsin asked the White House to allow them to secede from the Union by filing a petition with the White House’s We The People website.

“This is not cute. This is not funny,” UW-Milwaukee Professor of Governmental Affairs Mordecai Lee told WITI. “I’m not sure if we should take it seriously in the sense of even paying attention to it. I’m not really sure if we should take it as a funny joke of these peculiar, abhorrent, odd-ball activities, or if this is a signal — a kind of above-the-water-line iceberg that’s telling us things are still really divisive in America.”

“I think we need to put it pretty bluntly — talking about secession is being a traitor to America,” he added.

Watch the video below from WITI, broadcast in November of 2013.

[Health Care protest in Grand Junction, CO (FlickrRoni Weiss)]

(h/t: Talking Points Memo)

I don’t know why I believe the things I believe. I’d like to think I’ve thought them out rationally but probably I believe them because my parents believe them or because of tribalistic identifications I make or because Megan McArdle and Gregg Easterbrook don’t believe them (maybe this last one does fall under “thought them out rationally”).

Anyone who tells you that they’re sure they’ve come to their conclusions fairly and rationally is lying. Not lying that they’ve come to their conclusions fairly and rationally, but lying that they’re sure that they have. There’s no way to know. This was one of my favorite Atrios posts of all time:

You should be congratulated for choosing a candidate after carefully and rationally analyzing the situation.

Everyone else should be ashamed of themselves for letting their irrational emotions dictate their choices.

Of course, total belief in one’s own innate ability to be reasonable is one of the hallmarks of our contemporary Very Serious People. This from Andrew Sullivan almost made me laugh:

I’m not taking this position because – to count some of the milder terms thrown in my direction in the last few days – I have internalized homophobia, I want to leverage others’ suffering for web traffic, I have never done anything to advance gay equality, I am a hypocrite/privileged white male/barebacker/Uncle Tom, and on and on. I’m taking this position because it is my honestly thought-out view.

How can anyone claim to know this about themselves?

One of my favorite twists on this is the Very Serious Person who dismisses all his critics as uninformed partisans, but then screams LIBERAL ELITISM when anyone points out, say, that ignorance of where the Crimea is located correlates with support for US military involvement there:

Academics' study proves: Americans too dumb to participate in policy debate. http://t.co/Psuphh5qtz #InstinctualCondescension

— Charles Lane (@ChuckLane1) April 8, 2014

This is what makes things tough for conservative VSPs: the whole VSP thing is based on elitist condescension to the plebes, but many conservative arguments are based on the idea that reg’lar Murkinn plebes don’t need no book learnin’ to know better than their hippie overlords.

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A stunning art project in Pakistan:

A new project, initiated by a collective of artists from around the world includingthe French JR, has tried to reach the people pulling the trigger in America's drone wars—the drone operators themselves.

It’s called “Not A Bug Splat,” and its gets its name from the term drone operators use for a successful “kill,” because—in the pixelated grayscale of the drone camera—ending a human life looks like squashing a bug.

The collective created a huge poster of a child whom organizers say lost his family to drone strikes in the Pakistan’s heavily bombed province, Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa. “Now, when viewed by a drone camera, what an operator sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim’s face,” reads the project’s website.

In the last decade, drone operators have killed as many as 3,600 people in northwest Pakistan alone. Those people—they include as many as 951 civilians and 200 children—died without trial or jury. They were specks on the screen, and then they were dead.

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Congressional Republicans decided that one way to really jam Democrats was to make them vote to keep their subsidy for their health insurance by killing a Republican spending bill that would take them away. Who they were really jamming are the people who work for them.

There's a new front in the battle over Obamacare: Republican congressional staffers are angry at their bosses for trying to deprive them of affordable insurance. [...]

"I understand it politically, and as a talking point," one rank-and-file Republican staffer says of the Vitter and McCaul measures. "But Congress literally threw staff under the bus on this…You're hurting staff assistants who are sorting your mail."

Staffers don't make as much money as you may think, he adds. "When I started on the Hill answering phone calls, I'd hear people saying, 'You're a rich congressional staffer,' and I'm like, 'you must be out of your mind.'" Some low-level congressional employees make as little as about $28,000 a year; House staff salaries are the lowest they've been since 2007.

The main reason the subsidy for congressional staff covered by Obamacare exists is because leadership from both parties demanded it: They didn't want to risk losing staff who wouldn't be able to afford to work for them any more if they had to pay the entire bill for their insurance. Now House Republicans are showing them how much they really care. The good news is, we should get some much juicier leaking about the GOP civil war from anonymous staff looking for revenge.