Politics and other nightmares

Same old, dreary same old:

Two days after defeating tea party challenger Matt Bevin, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that he would no longer stand with Rand.

Ayn Rand, that is.

The Republican Party was the big winner in Tuesday's primaries, because safe establishment candidates beat out those tea party extremists, which means the GOP has a great shot at retaking the Senate in November. That's the gist of most of the analyses I've read anyway. This one from NBC's Chuck Todd is typical:

Holy cow. Is it possible someone in the Obama administration is actually going to held accountable for something?

Uh-oh. In defending his plan to use Medicaid dollars to expand the Healthy Indiana Plan, Mike Pence has a "George W. Bush problem":

Remember the main reason given for the proposed amendment to the Indiana constitution banning gay marriage? It was that it would bebetter than the state's a;ready-existing law banning same because a judge could come along and invalidate the law. A constitutional ban would be more permanent.

Well, tell that to the good citizens of Oregon:

If you go to Brighton, Mich., better watch your !@#$% mouth:

More goofy antics from the loveable Sgt. Schultz administration:

What an awful, awful thing to tell graduating seniors:

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) -- Secretary of State John Kerry urged Yale University graduates on Sunday to keep faith in government's ability to break gridlock, even as many problems remain unsolved.

I used to compulsively keep up with the news while I was on vacation -- it's in the nature of a journalist to try to avoid missing out on anything. But in recent years, I go out of my way to avoid the news because, well, because it's usually "same story, different names." When I left for vacation last week, for example, the big news was over Condi Rice withdrawing as a commencement speaker because or protests. So what was one of the first stories I saw this morning?

People Francis has coined my favorite new oxymoron:

On Friday, Francis called for the United Nations to promote a "worldwide ethical mobilization" of solidarity with the poor in a new spirit of generosity.