Last Call For The Party Of Caitlyn Jenner

America met Caitlyn Jenner (nee Bruce) Tuesday, and it took less than 24 hours for the Republican party she supports to turn on her completely.  Brendan O'Neill at the Spectator:

The worship of Caitlyn, and the hectoring of anyone who refuses to scrape before her icon, has graphically exposed the intolerant edge to trans thinking. The insistence that we not only refer to Bruce/Caitlyn as ‘she’ but also project this backwards – recognising, in the words of the Guardian, that she has ‘always been a woman’ – is borderline Orwellian. It’s a rewriting of history, a memory-holing of old inconvenient facts. Strikingly, the Guardian writer says people like Bruce/Caitlyn have ‘always been women… even when they were “fathering” children’. Notice it’s the ‘fathering’ bit that is in scare quotes, suggesting it wasn’t real, while the description of Bruce as a woman is treated as an incontestable truth. War is peace, freedom is slavery, man is woman.

Nice.  And then today, El Rushbo went on the offensive:

Limbaugh said on his radio show Tuesday that liberals are trying to “redefine normalcy” in an effort to stigmatize conservatives and that conservatives shouldn’t agree to their terms by accepting Caitlyn Jenner as a woman.

He likewise dismissed a conservative blog that wrote that Republicans should embrace Jenner as one of their own to seem more humane, saying that doing so would constitute falling into a liberal trap. 

Under this system, “conservatives and Republicans are the new weirdos, the new kooks,” the pundit said, “and that is part of the political objective here in normalizing all of this really marginal behavior. I mean, if less than 1 percent of the population is engaging in it, it’s marginalized behavior. It isn’t normal, no matter how you define it.” 

“We should not be celebrating this, we should not be lionizing this, we should not be encouraging this. These people have a very serious problem, and they need treatment,” he said. “They need help, not encouragement.”

You didn't honestly think that with Bruce being a long-time Republican that Republicans would accept Caitlyn, did you?

Moderately Radical In Congress

As I said last week, the notion that the Democrats are somehow as radically ideological as Republicans is nonsense, and the data is so overwhelmingly indicative of the complete opposite of Peter Wehner's accusations that it almost proves just how radically conservative the GOP has become in the last 40 years.

Political scientists have known for years that political polarization is largely a one-sided phenomenon: in recent decades the Republican Party has moved to the right much faster than Democrats have moved to the left. As Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution has described it, "Republicans have become a radical insurgency—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political opposition."

The data backing this claim up are pretty solid. The most widely-used measure of political polarization, a score of ideology based on votingdeveloped by Kenneth Poole and Howard Rosenthal, has shown that the Republicans in the Senate and especially the House have drifted away from the center far more rapidly than Democrats. The chart below, taken from the most recent slice of their data released just last month, illustrate this pretty clearly:

In other words, House Democrats are almost as liberal as they were in the 1920's, and have been drifting back towards that level since WW II after a sharply moderate turn during the Great Depression.  House Republicans on the other hand have been skyrocketing towards radical conservatism since the Carter administration.

That's not the shocking part.  This is the shocking part.



Some 90% of Republicans are partisans, with 10% moderates (or squishy, traitorous RINOs are they are called in 2015.)  90% of Democrats are in fact moderates, precisely the opposite.  And again, House Republican radicalism skyrocketed since 1976 or so.  If anything, from Eisenhower through Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford the Republicans had a higher percentage of moderates than the Democrats.

This is why our Congress is broken and has been for basically my entire lifetime.

New Republicans, Old Problems

Twenty years after Timothy McVeigh blew up a government building in Oklahoma City, the Republican party of today has adopted many parts of his militia manifesto.

Republican presidential candidates gathered last month at the Oklahoma City Cox Conference Center, just a few blocks from the site of what was the Alfred R. Murrah Federal Building. Two decades ago, anti-government militia sympathizer Timothy McVeigh blew it up in what he called an act of war against the U.S. government. It was the worst crime of domestically bred terrorism in American history. McVeigh was executed in 2001, but since then, some of his militia ideals have gone mainstream and even been introduced as laws in many states, including Oklahoma. 

Legislators in dozens of states have submitted proposals to nullify or block federal laws—a longtime goal of militias. These have included exempting states from federal gun laws and educational standards, as well as, of course, Obamacare. That doesn’t make these anti-federal statutes part of McVeigh’s madness, but Republican politicians now often echo conspiracy theories once relegated to troglodyte pamphlets. And several states have passed laws making gold a currency—a step toward returning to the gold standard—even though currency is a federal responsibility. 

When Cliven Bundy engaged in an armed standoff with Bureau of Land Management agents in 2014, after a federal court order demanded he get his cattle off federal land, as he hadn’t paid grazing fees for 20 years, several of the current Republican presidential candidates sided with the outlaw. As armed militia members converged in Nevada to protect Bundy, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas called the events “the unfortunate and tragic culmination of the path President Obama has set the federal government on.” Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas, said: “I have a problem with the federal government putting citizens in the position of having to feel like they have to use force to deal with their own government.” Mike Huckabee opined: “There is something incredibly wrong when a government believes that some blades of grass that a cow is eating is [such] an egregious affront to the government of the United States that we would literally put a gun in a citizen’s face and threaten to shoot him over it.”

Tarso Ramos, executive director of Political Research Associates, which tracks right-wing extremism, says these and other formerly fringe ideas mainstreamed after McVeigh’s assault—just not right away. “The Oklahoma City bombing had a sobering effect for a while,” he says. “Then, with the election of Obama, you get a whole new wave of Patriot activity and a new variant of conspiracy-ism, including the birther stuff and the idea that Obama is an agent of powerful elites.”

And the worst part is if you listen to the Huckabees, the Rand Pauls, the Ted Cruzes of the GOP, the things they are saying now are the things the militias of 20 years ago said then and still say today: that this government is an enemy of the people, that states are not subject to federal laws they disagree with, and that the tree of liberty requires blood again.

It's a combination of toxic Bircher hatred and white supremacist doctrine that has given birth to a monster.  And most likely one of that monsters many heads will be the Republican nominee for President.

There is a direct line from Tim McVeigh to Cliven Bundy and that line is a bright, bloody red.

StupidiNews!

• South Koreaan officials say two are dead as some 30 cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) have led to hundreds being quarantined in the country.
• California's state Senate has voted to raise the state's legal smoking age to 21 as the measure now heads to the state Assembly, matching recent legislation in Hawaii.
• As promised, President Obama signed into law the USA Freedom Act just hours after the NSA reform measure passed the Senate yesterday in a 67-32 vote.
• As Friday's debt default deadline approaches, Greek PM Alexis Tsipras and EU leaders will meet to decide the country's fate with a final offer from the troika presented today.
• Gaming software service Steam will begin offering refunds for customers who have played a game for less than two hours and have had the game for fewer than 14 days.

Last Call For Blattered, Bruised And Broken

A week after being re-elected, Sepp Blatter is suddenly resigning as FIFA President.  My question is what did they have on him, as clearly he was doing victory laps over the weekend. Whatever it was, the guy went from king of the castle to royally screwed in record time.

Of course, maybe John Oliver was the one to finish him off.  

Nothing Will Be Done About Campaign Finance Reform

Even if recent Supreme Court rulings hadn't destroyed campaign finance reform, the notion that voters actually care about fixing the system is laughable.

As the 2016 presidential race begins, 84 percent of Americans think money has too much influence in political campaigns now. Criticism of the role of money cuts across party lines - large majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents all think money has too much influence.

Most Americans see widespread problems with how election campaigns are funded in the United States. Forty-six percent think the system for funding political campaigns has so much wrong with it that it needs to be rebuilt completely, and another 39 percent think that while there are good things in the system, fundamental changes are needed. Just 13 percent of Americans think only minor changes are needed.

Americans across the political spectrum are critical of the way campaigns are financed, but independents are the most negative. Fifty-one percent of independents think the system must be completely rebuilt. And 46 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans agree.

On the surface it seems extremely simple: five out of six Americans think money has too much influence on politicians.  But like gun control or climate change, Americans just don't give enough of a damn to make fixing it a priority.

Most who think changes are needed are not optimistic that such changes will be forthcoming: 58 percent are pessimistic that changes will actually be made.

Nevertheless, very few Americans prioritize campaign finance over other domestic issues when asked to name the most important problem facing the country today. Americans' top issue priority continues to be the economy and jobs; health care and immigration follow. Less than one percent volunteer campaign fundraising as the most important issue facing the country.

It's hard to care even remotely about the billions going to pay off our politicians when you're out of work and can't put food on the table, I guess.

Democrats Can't Be This Lucky

Conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt has a great idea for helping Republicans Democrats in 2016 by suggesting the GOP should embrace fresh, bold new ideas double down on white guys on the ticket.

Saying it's "obvious," best-selling author and national talk show host Hugh Hewitt is urging all of the nearly two dozen potential Republican presidential candidates to pick 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney as their vice presidential choice. 

In his upcoming book The Queen, directed at Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hewitt said that Romney has the influence and status of former Vice President Dick Cheney, making him a formidable campaigner and White House partner. 

That, he added in the book provided to Secrets, will force Clinton to make an equally top-notch pick, not somebody like Joe Biden, the "lovable dolt" chosen by Barack Obama. 

The eventual GOP nominee, wrote Hewitt, should pick Romney for just one term, using his fundraising power and credibility to beat Clinton. By serving just one term, Romney wouldn't be a political threat to the president he serves and it would create loyalty from potential successors.

Romney's "credibility" will beat Hillary.

OK.

Sure.

Wake me up when that happens, I'll be over here in reality.

Seriously, if Hewitt's plan to win with somebody from the Clown Car Crew requires the gravitas of Mitt Romney to the formula, then you're still multiplying a number by zero and expecting to get a number that magically is not zero.

Or, in the wordds of the guy who cleaned Romney's clock: "Please proceed, governor."

StupidiNews!

• Several hundred people are still missing in China as a passenger ship sank in the Yangtze River near the city of Nanjing with more than 400 aboard.
• Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson is vowing to improve airport security after ABC News reported on TSA agents failing to detect mock weapons and explosives 95% of the time.
• GOP lawmakers in North Carolina have overridden Republican Gov. Pat McCrory's veto on a bill that would allow public officials to opt out of performing same-sex marriages.
• HBSC, Europe's largest bank, may cut as many as 20,000 jobs over the next year as a response to tough new British banking regulations.
• Intel is expected to acquire chipmaker Altera for $17 billion as consolidation in the industry continues on the heels of last month's $37 billion deal between Avago and Broadcom.

Last Call For Huckleberry's Hat In The Ring

It's pretty impressive to see a 2016 candidate so brickheaded that he loses the presidency in his announcement speech.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) not only became the latest Republican to jump into the 2016 presidential race, he also became the latest Republican to signal strong support for deep Social Security cuts.

"Washington's failure to do the hard but right thing has put Social Security and Medicare in jeopardy," Graham said during his speech on Monday. "As my generation retires both programs are on track to go bust. We're living longer and fewer workers are supporting more retirees. That's unsustainable, everybody knows it, but not everybody will admit it. We have to fix entitlement programs to make sure people who need the benefits the most receive them. That's going to require determined presidential leadership."

Because what America really, really wants is somebody who will screw everybody under 60 out of the couple hundred bucks they get a month and everybody under 40 out of ever seeing a dime in retirement benefits.

Graham specifically described how he and his sister Darlene benefited on Social Security while growing up. 

"I know from personal experience how important these programs are to the lives of millions of Americans. As Darlene mentioned, we lost our parents when I was a young man and she was in middle school. We depended on Social Security benefits to survive. I've been fortunate," Graham continued. "I've done better than I've ever dreamed. If I and others like me have to take a little bit less and pay a little more to help those who need it most, so be it. And younger people, you may just have to work a little bit longer. As president I'll gladly do what it takes to save a program that once saved my family."

To save it of course he'll have to cut billions from it and raise the retirement age to 72 or higher, which is pretty awesome when the plan is to keep Social Security's retirement age above the average black life expectancy.

Climate Of Hyperbole

Noah Rothman continues to be one of the most vile conservative pundits, and he gets around too, this week implying the phrase "climate change denial" is anti-Semitic in Commentary Magazine.

But no record of failure will keep future generations from bellying up to the table and pushing in their chips. The latest fad that has come to dominate the attentions of our would-be Cassandras is the matter of climate change, and specifically the immediate threat this phenomenon poses to American national security. Washington Postopinion writer Catherine Rampell is the latest to submit a classic example of partisan agitation disguised as dispassionate analysis related to this vogue subject on Thursday. She contended in that essay that the Republican 2016 presidential field, one primarily composed of various breeds of hawks, is so blinkered by their ideology that they have thus far refused to address at least one glaring national security threat: That posed by global temperature fluctuations and the chaotic weather patterns the result. 

In this painfully transparent bit of political advocacy masquerading as defense analysis, Rampell praised Praised Barack Obama’s sagacity on climate issues and scoffed at the GOP field for signing the “No Climate Tax Pledge.” In a galling and audacious effort to frame Republicans as fear-mongering cynics and climate change alarmists as sober forecasters, Rampell contended that those GOP aspirants that do not regard weather pattern shifts as a threat as grave as, say, the invasion and annexation of territory in Europe by a revanchist nuclear power, are simply “incoherent.” 

“Actually it’s worse than incoherent,” she averred. “It’s an oxymoron.” 

But this piece did not consist entirely of polemics. Rampell did marshal some evidence to buttress her contention that America’s defense establishment is growing ever more concerned about the threat posed by climate change. To support that conclusion, she produced the Pentagon’s 2014 “Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap.” Rampell noted that the DOD has dubbed climate change a potential “threat multiplier.” She added that this report, and others like it, have “warned in no uncertain terms of the severe threats” posed by climate changes. 

No climate catastrophist would earn his or her stripes without deploying the vituperative and insulting claim that those who remain skeptical of the doomsday scenarios are indulging in “denialism.” The appropriation of the term, once exclusively used to describe the virulent strain of anti-Semitism that dubbed the Holocaust a myth so as to delegitimize post-War reparations to the Jewish people, has become a common form of self-validation among modern armchair climatologists. Only a few on the right would “deny” that the ever-changing climate is, in fact, changing, but many others do take issue with the notion of anthropogenic global warming or the many proposed means of addressing it. Rampell’s use of that term is as crude as it is ill-informed, but so is her citation of the Pentagon’s 2014 climate report.

So there you have it, Rothman all but insinuating that use of term "climate change denial" is actually an anti-Semitic insult to the Jewish people.  It's an incredible leap, even for as someone as vituperative as Rothman, but there you have it.  If ever there was an example of a faux controversy deployed to cover up a real one, brother, this is it.

And all this to try to distract from the fact that even the Pentagon believes climate change is going to lead to resource wars and conflicts over water, food, and arable land in the more dangerous future that we now must prepare for.

So Now What, Kentucky Fried Senators?

This is a tale of my two senators, who have managed to put a huge hole in the PATRIOT Act.

The government’s authority to sweep up vast quantities of phone records in the hunt for terrorists expired at 12:01 a.m. Monday after Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, blocked an extension of the program during an extraordinary and at times caustic Sunday session of the Senate.

Still, the Senate signaled that it was ready to curtail the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection program with likely passage this week of legislation that would shift the storage of telephone records from the government to the phone companies. The House overwhelmingly passedthat bill last month. Senators voted, 77 to 17, on Sunday to take up the House bill.

Mr. Paul’s stand may have forced the temporary expiration of parts of the post-9/11 Patriot Act used by the National Security Agency to collect phone records, but he was helped by the miscalculation of Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, who sent the Senate on a weeklong vacation after blocking the House bill before Memorial Day.

Let's get one thing straight right off the bat: Both of these men are irresponsible clowns, and the whole thing could have been avoided if the USA Freedom bill had been passed last month. Both McConnell and Paul concede that the USA Freedom act, which makes serious reforms to the NSA, backed by President Obama and both parties, was the way forward.  Instead, ego, brinksmanship, and serious screw-ups left us with a self-inflicted wound to our intelligence capability that could have been avoided weeks ago.

Both of these men are an embarrassment to my state and my country, and as a constituent I'm furious.  McConnell deserves a lot of blame here, but Rand Paul's irresponsible rhetoric means he didn't "win" this battle either, at one point saying that his fellow lawmakers secretly were hoping for a terrorist attack on US soil just so they could "blame" him for it.



If that isn't a massive load of idiotic nonsense, I don't know what is.  Both senators have shamed this state and the United States, as usual.

StupidiNews!

• Several controversial data collection provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act have now expired as the Senate failed to pass extension, but will instead consider the House's USA FREEDOM bill.
• A new report finds that the Social Security Administration may have paid up to $20.2 million in benefits to former members of the Nazi Party.
• Both France and Germany are saying that an EU plan to redistribute refugees from Africa and the Middle East doesn't take into account migrants that have already arrived in Europe.
• Greece faces a June 5 deadline for the next series of payments to avoid debt default as the European Union tries to find a solution to the problem.
• Microsoft will officially roll out Windows 10 on July 29 for PCs and tablets, a free upgrade for current Windows 7 and 8.1 users.

Last Call For The Last Word

Slippery Rick Santorum is convinced that any Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage will not be the end of the fight.  If anything, Roe v Wade and Brown v Topeka Board of Education have proven that theory true, and like many bigots, he's laying the groundwork for open "civil disobedience" that he believes will materialize against it.

After the supreme court struck down the controversial Defense of Marriage Act (Doma) in June 2013, same-sex marriage has become legal in 37 states and the District of Columbia. The country’s highest court is due to decide the issue for good in a judgment expected to come down in June.

Nonetheless Santorum, a self-proclaimed “blue collar conservative” who polled strongly with evangelical voters in the 2012 primaries and was appearing on NBC, said: “I think it’s important to understand that the supreme court doesn’t have the final word. It has its word. Its word has validity. But it’s important for Congress and the president, frankly, to push back when the supreme court gets it wrong.”

Santorum was asked if he agreed with the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, another Christian conservative and declared candidate for the 2016 GOP nomination, that on this issue the supreme court could be overruled by the states.

“I don’t advocate civil disobedience,” he said. “I do advocate the role of an informed citizen to try to overturn when a court makes a mistake and gets an issue wrong.

“I think the supreme court has as an equal branch of government the ability to overrule Congress and the president; they do it all the time,” the former US senator from Pennsylvania added. “But I also feel it’s the role of the Congress and the president to push back. It’s important that they be understood to be equal branches of government.”

And again, while Loving v Virginia shows that miscegenation laws can be overcome, same-sex marriage is likely to be a long, ugly fight over the years.  We're already seeing red states attempt to pass laws to stop same-sex marriage being performed or recognized and the goal is to tie up same-sex marriages in the courts for as long as possible.  Despite any sort of SCOTUS ruling, it could take decades for all 50 states to allow them.

And Roe v Wade again shows that rulings can be chipped away at the state level until they are de facto overturned, as abortions are all but impossible to get in dozens of states in 2015. There's no downside for the GOP to keep fighting on this as their new "culture war" front for as long as it takes.

Sunday Long Read: The Productivity Myth

This week's long read is from the Virginia Quarterly Review on the real effects of the relentless push for more and more productivity in the corporate world.  The city of Sparta, Tennessee played by all the rules and workers turned a struggling factory into one of the most productive manufacturing plants in North America. Lisa Norris and Dave Uhrik were on the management team that put Sparta on the map and the plant was held up as a model of American "reshoring" of jobs.

And then they watched as all the jobs were shipped to Mexico anyway.

The humming Sparta plant had it all. For one thing, the town is within a day’s haul of most US markets—​from New York and Chicago to Atlanta, St. Louis, and Dallas. Tennessee has decent, well-​maintained highways. The plant was union—​a new experience for Norris—​but this IBEW local was steely-​eyed about keeping and creating jobs; it had, for example, accepted a two-​tier pay scale and surrendered contract protections in order to attract a highly automated production line from New Jersey. The press for that new line, known as a Bliss, was nearly three stories high (so big it had to be anchored twenty feet underground) and could stamp out eight or ten massive commercial fluorescent fixtures every minute. It attracted lucrative contracts from hospitals, prisons, grocery-​store chains, and Walmart super​centers. Norris called it “a monument.” Brent Hall, the union rep, described it as a beating heart. “Every time that press rolled over,” he said, “the whole building would shake.”

Other production lines at the plant could push out smaller, custom products tailored to the needs of a specific buyer. A whole swath of the maintenance crew had been sent, on the plant’s dime, to get certified as industrial electricians and welders and millwrights so that they could retool machines on the fly, switching production from one job to the next in a matter of minutes. “Anything they wanted, we’d build it for them,” Scott Vincent, one veteran electrician told me. With Uhrik and Norris at the helm, the plant started buying steel and other inventory on consignment, and trimmed turnaround times to the point that its invoices would be getting paid before the bills on raw materials were even due. Tasked with cutting costs by $4 million, the management team tapped employees to identify inefficiencies in the assembly process, worked with suppliers to reduce components costs, and drastically reduced the number of products with defects. The plant boosted productivity by 7 percent and kept labor costs low, at around 4 percent. Still, thanks to the union, most workers were earning $13 to $15 an hour—​“real decent money around here,” as one maintenance worker told me, especially for a workforce where many had never graduated high school—​with two to three weeks of vacation and a blue-​chip health plan. Employees stuck around for years, knew their jobs inside and out, and had a rare esprit de corps. When they faced tight deadlines, fabricators would volunteer to come in as early as 4 or 5 a.m. so they could get a head start before the paint crew arrived at six. In December 2009 the Sparta facility was named by Industry​Week as a Best Plant of the year, one of the top ten in North America. In the months that followed, it won Best Plant within Philips’s global lighting division as well as the firm’s global “Lean Challenge.” That summer, plant managers invited state officials and legislators to Sparta to celebrate.

Then, one morning in November 2010, a Philips executive no one recognized drove up and walked into the plant, accompanied by a security guard wearing sunglasses and a sidearm. He summoned all the employees back to the shipping department and abruptly announced that the plant would be shut down. Though the workers didn’t know it at the time, most of their jobs would be offshored to Monterrey, Mexico. The two of them then walked out the door and drove off. “It was a shock, I’ll tell you,” Ricky Lack said more than two years later. Still brawny in his late fifties, he’d hired on at the plant in 1977, when he was nineteen years old. “My dad worked there,” he said. “Half the plant’s mom or dad or brother worked there. We still don’t know why they left.”

They left because they thought they would make moeny making light fixtures in Mexico and selling them to Americans.  Then a funny thing happened: we stopped having good jobs where Americans could afford to buy things.

Do read the whole thing.

A Father's Greatest Nightmare

Vice President Joe Biden (and I would dare say the nation) is today mourning the death of his son, former Delaware Attorney General  Beau Biden, who passed away from brain cancer last night.

In a statement Saturday night, the vice president said: “It is with broken hearts that Hallie, Hunter, Ashley, Jill and I announce the passing of our husband, brother and son, Beau, after he battled brain cancer with the same integrity, courage and strength he demonstrated every day of his life.”

“In the words of the Biden family: Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known.”

In 2010, the younger Mr. Biden, known as Beau, had suffered what officials described as a mild stroke. Three years later, he was admitted to the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston after what White House officials described at the time as “an episode of disorientation and weakness.”

Officials said in 2013 that the doctors in Texas had removed a small lesion from his brain.

Mr. Biden’s death marks a second tragic loss for the vice president, whose first wife, Neilia, and 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident in 1972 when the station wagon they were driving in to go Christmas shopping was hit by a tractor-trailer. Beau Biden and his brother, Hunter, were also injured in the crash, but both survived.

A popular Democratic politician in his home state who was known to be very close to his father, Mr. Biden served two terms as Delaware’s top law enforcement official before announcing last year that he would not run for a third term so he could make a bid for governor in 2016.

“What started as a thought — a very persistent thought — has now become a course of action that I wish to pursue,” Mr. Biden wrote in an open letter to his constituents in April 2014.

As recently as late February, some Delaware politicians close to Mr. Biden told news organizations that they still believed Mr. Biden planned to run for governor in 2016.

But Mr. Biden’s health had apparently declined in recent weeks, and he was taken to Walter Reed on May 20.

I can only imagine the heartbreak Joe Biden must be going through, having lost a daughter and his first wife to tragedy more than 40 years ago.  For a father to outlive his child again must be truly miserable.

Prayers for Vice President Biden and his family today.