It seems so very unlikely that I’ll ever get married again, but if I do I hope she’ll understand why wedding songs are requiems, why the confession of love cannot help connoting loss, betrayal, rejection. Love is the denial of these tragedies and only the existence of pain can give happiness meaning.

I hope she’ll forgive me this image of the misunderstood clown clutching desperately at a moment of contact with a stranger because he knows it may be all there is in the world. Full story »

You may have heard that the State of California is facing a monster deficit. Figures bounce around a bit, but most estimates have the shortfall at or near $28 billion, and the mess has Gov. Jerry Brown pondering Armageddon: enough posturing and arguing – he seems prepared to let the citizenry see how it feels about the reality of shutting it all down. Don’t want to pay for schools? Cool – we won’t have any.

One sympathizes with the people of the Golden State. They do contribute more in federal taxes than any other state, and the ideology of our times has us all convinced that paying taxes is the same thing as flushing perfectly good cash down the toilet. Full story »

Today would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday. In his honor, S&R is hosting a monster mashup party. Let’s get it started in here.

Item 1: Guns? Screw guns. What we need is a mandatory five-day waiting period for the purchase of any audio or video editing software. Then again, happiness is a warm gun, they say. Although this is more about hammers and polyester than powder and hot lead.

Full story »

So, Rush Limbaugh just got married. Congrats, Rush – we wish you well.

We wanted to note this momentous occasion because, as you know, Rush is a big proponent of family values, and few things say family like walking down the aisle and publicly expressing your lifelong commitment to the person of the opposite gender that you love.

Especially when you’re so committed to traditional values that you do it four times. Wow.

Sir Elton John, whose raging queerness makes him incapable of family values, was allegedly paid $1M to play the reception. Full story »

Hey, I’m not making this stuff up.

We have met Neanderthals, and they are us – or about 1 to 4 percent of each of us.

That is one implication of a four-year effort to sequence the Neanderthal genome – essentially setting out in order some 3 billion combinations of four key molecules that together represent the Neanderthals’ genetic blueprint. (Full story…)

Interesting. So, if some folks have more Neanderthal slouching around their genome than others, who might these four percenters be? I have theories. Full story »

As anyone who remembers The 5th Estate, which was the Scholars & Rogues precursor, will recall, this community is founded on a strong sense of bipartisanship and the belief that much can be accomplished when the neo-conservative and staunch liberal talk honestly across the table.

We’ve gotten away from this ideal over the past couple of years, but we’ve taken note of the bipartisan successes driven by President Obama since he took office. So today we’re pleased to announce that S&R has entered into a strategic agreement with The Drudge Report, a site that literally defined the conservative alternative news industry when it was launched in 1996. Full story »

It started innocently enough:

A tea party organizer angry over Rep. Tom Perriello’s (D-Va.) vote in favor of health care reform published what he thought was the freshman member’s home address on a blog, in case any readers “want to drop by” and provide a “personal touch” to their views.

Unfortunately, mistakes were made: Full story »

The independently minded political animal always wrestles with times of transition, and the changeover from the Bush to Obama regimes has been worse than most. During the Dubya years it was easy to identify the enemy and to hate him with a blinding passion. Sweet Jesus, George II and his sidekick, The Dick Cheney, played their roles with less nuance than the bad guy in Rambo 12: Return of Ming the Merciless (directed by Roland Emmerich), making it easy to identify with the loyal opposition just on principle.

But it’s important to remember that the enemy of my enemy isn’t necessarily my friend. They might just be fighting over which one gets to eat my tender bits. Full story »

The move is afoot to add pole-dancing to the Olympics. No, I’m not making that up, and no, I’m not talking about what happens every Saturday night in clubs all over Warsaw. If you’ve suffered through “athletic” competitions like synchronized swimming (Busby Berkeley choreography in water), curling (there’s a pregnant woman on the Canadian team) and ice dancing (really, wouldn’t we all enjoy it more if it were ice line dancing?) you probably figured it was only a matter of time. My guess is that the judges will stuff dollar bills into the athletes’ thongs, and whoever closes the cabaret down with the most cash wins gold. From a development standpoint this one would be easy on the organizing committee, since there are already a lot of venues out by the airport. Full story »

Finally, after all these months, Eldrick Tont “Tiger” Woods is going to apologize. To you, to me, and to all the other people around the world that he cheated on. I know, I know, it’s not really his fault. He has an addiction. To cocktail waitresses (I think this is on page 486 of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual V, due out in 2013).

Most importantly, his apology will be carried live by CBS. By NBC. By ABC. By CNN, CNBC, HLN, Fox News, Fox Business and MSNBC. That makes it a bigger story than health care. It’s bigger than the guy who crashed a plane into the IRS building in Austin. It’s bigger than Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It’s even bigger than the Winter Olympics, which are offered on tape-delay.

And it’s sure as hell bigger than this assortment of crybaby hippie socialist bullshit. Full story »

Colorado is a beautiful place and it always ranks right at the top of those most desirable places to live rankings (heck, a new poll says the People’s Republic of Boulder is the happiest place in America), but be clear about one thing before you pack up the family to head this way: a consistent voting majority of our citizens are butt-stupid when it comes to taxes. We’re the ones who blazed the trail for the “Taxpayer Bill of Rights” (TABOR) movement, and we’ve been paying a steep price for it ever since. For instance:

• Under TABOR, Colorado declined from 35th to 49th in the nation in K-12 spending as a percentage of personal income.
• Colorado’s average per-pupil funding fell by more than $400 relative to the national average. Full story »

First, the official response:

Full story »

Hoo boy – if this is a sign of campaign ads to come, Californy is the place you oughta be…

Full story »

The Supreme Court has decreed that corporations are persons and money is speech, so it was only a matter of time before a company decided to exercise its Constitutional right to run for Congress.

Following the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to allow unlimited corporate funding of federal campaigns, Murray Hill Inc. today announced it is filing to run for U.S. Congress. “Until now,” Murray Hill Inc. said in a statement, “corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence-peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.” Murray Hill Inc. is believed to be the first “corporate person” to exercise its constitutional right to run for office. Full story »

If you’ve visited America anytime during the past couple of centuries, you realize that the nation has something of a church and state problem. You can argue the details all you like, but the bottom line is that the Framers of the Constitution set the stage for controversy by being too damned vague. I mean, “separation of Church and State” – what the hell does that really mean, anyway? We have these problems before us today because Jefferson, Madison and Co. didn’t have the basic good sense to insist on specificity, which is odd, given that all the Founding Fathers were all pretty clearly fundamentalists. As, one assumes, were the Founding Mothers. They just toss terms like “God” and “Church” and “separation” around like we all know what they mean, when clearly we don’t. Full story »

On January 1 most of the world rolled forward into a new decade. The Catholic Republic of Ireland, meanwhile, rolled backward into a former century.

Lawmakers in staunchly Catholic Ireland passed the law in July, but it came into force January 1.

A person breaks the law by saying or publishing anything “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion.”

Errrm, wait a second. Full story »

In Mike’s most recent Nota Bene, he points us to a disturbing, if not altogether surprising little vignette from Capitol Hill.

When House Democrats gathered on Friday for their end-of-the week caucus meeting in the basement of the Capitol, caucus chairman John Larson (D-Conn.) told the group he wanted them to hear first from Rep. Michael Capuano, who’d just returned from a primary campaign for the Senate seat in Massachusetts vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy.

Larson asked Capuano, who finished in second place, to share the wisdom he learned on the campaign trail. Full story »

Remember the scene in Spiderman 3 when Eddie Brock (played by Topher Grace) goes to church and prays that God will kill Peter Parker? That probably got a laugh out of most viewers because, well, how over-the-top preposterous is it to pray to God to kill someone you don’t like? Jesus us a god of love, isn’t He? But hey, it’s Hollywood, it’s a superhero action flick, and villains in these films have to be, you know, a little over-the-top, right?

Still, if that whole scene set your plausibility alarms to ringing, you might want to brace yourself for this one.

Think Progress makes a great catch on C-SPAN this morning: Someone calls in while Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) is answering the lines, practically in tears because Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) missed this morning’s procedural vote on health care. Full story »

It goes without saying that we should all be mindful of our obligations, be they legal, ethical, spiritual, or, in the case of one Eldrick Tont “Tiger” Woods, marital. But I have to tell you – I just fucking love it when an industry manufactures a category 5 shitstorm out of thin air and then lectures me about my moral duties.

If I might appropriate some phraseology from my colleague Dr. Slammy and popular conservative telepundit Stephen Colbert: Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., can gargle my velvety smooth mansack….

Here’s a story that makes you think.

• Abusive GOP lawmaker
• Slips her something that distorts her perceptions
• Beats the hell out of her during allegedly consensual sex
• No safe word to make it stop

Damn. Sounds kinda like a metaphor for American political life, huh?

UPDATE: Woops – now it’s a felony assault charge….