Garance Franke-Ruta

From The Warriors to Wall Street and No Wave to new money, the film-buff mayor oversaw a city transformed.

Ed Koch's New York is the New York City of my youth. I arrived in Manhattan from Southern Mexico in 1978, his first year at City Hall, and ping-ponged between that central borough and other parts of the country until my family finally resettled full-time in the city in 1988. You can read about the city Koch inherited and tried to bully into shape in an array of wonderfully detailed obituaries on the occasion of his passing. But his New York belonged to millions of others, too, and it's worth seeing also how the people of the city that never sleeps saw it and sought to represent it themselves during his three terms in office. One way to do that is to look at the movies by and about New Yorkers made when he was mayor, something the cinemaphile Koch -- a onetime Atlantic movie reviewer -- might have appreciated.

"New Yorkers were particularly proud of Mayor Koch because he was so proud of New York. Every atom in his body lived, breathed, spoke, and exuded the city. He helped save the city and, perhaps most important of all, gave it confidence when it was beginning to doubt itself, which helped pave the way for the growth and prosperity we're still experiencing today," Senator Chuck Schumer said in a statement Friday. "Every New Yorker will miss Ed Koch, and his towering presence."

Well, probably not every New Yorker. But there's no question that the narrative arc of the city was one of transformation under Mayor Koch, and that that arc is reflected in the cinema of his day. The great themes of movies about New York in the Koch era were power and the underground, art and finance, poverty and the new prosperity.

The New York of the 1970s that Koch sought to manage after his 1977 victory is the subject of some extraordinary and extraordinarily weird films, all gritty as the city itself in the era of bankruptcy, racial strife, and economic decline. If you want to know why he was hailed, you need to know what the city looked like before him. It is the subject and the backdrop of all these films -- fictions, to be sure, but not fantasies -- in which crime and corruption and the breakdown of the social order are all on display.

* 1972: Across 110th Street, a thriller about a corrupt cop and his honest deputy in drug-infested Harlem, starring a young Yaphet Kotto. Shocking to a contemporary viewer for its casual racism, the film is an of-its-era sketch of a neighborhood and its myths, which were revisited in 2008 in American Gangster.
* 1973: Serpico -- one of the great Al Pacino films, about whistle-blowing cop Frank Serpico.
* 1974: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, about a hostage crisis aboard a New York City subway train hijacked by four madmen.
* 1975: Dog Day Afternoon, another Al Pacino classic, about a failed bank heist and how a stand-off between the would-be robber and the police turned into a media sensation.
* 1976: Taxi Driver, featuring Robert DeNiro as a vigilante cab driver disgusted by crime and sleaze and a star turn by a very young Jodie Foster.

New York being New York, its fictions took many forms, some of them more experimental and less commercial than others. The best recent film I saw on the city in this period was the documentary Blank City, about No Wave film and the Cinema of Transgression in the East Village and Tribeca in the late 1970s and early 1980s -- the front-end of the Koch era. The trailer gives you a sense of the urban backdrop of the day, as well as some marvelous images of Blondie before she was a singer. It's very much worth seeing:

Koch's first term also saw The Warriors (1979), a fantasia about a gang from Coney Island trying to make it home from the Bronx after a gangland convention went awry and the rest of the city's thugs -- and police -- went on a manhunt for them.

The famous "come out to play-aay" fight scene set-up gives perhaps a better sense of the film than its own historic trailer.

Uptown, the same year, we got Woody Allen's more genteel Manhattan, with Diane Keaton. From the voice-over in the trailer: "Chapter One: He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. No, make that, he, he romanticized it all out of proportion. (Better.) ....Let me start this over. Chapter One: He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. (I love this.) New York was his town, and it always would be."

But the fears of the 1970s didn't dissipate easily, leading to 1981's Escape from New York, a dystopian fantasy about what the city would be like in 1997 -- "the high adventure of the future" imagined New York as a maximum security prison surrounded by mined bridges. In reality, it was the year Giuliani was re-elected to office, defeating Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger.

By 1984, the public image of the New York City was coming around, leading to films centered around dreams of making it in the city, such as The Pope of Greenwich Village:

But the city repaired itself unevenly. Across town we had 1984's Alphabet City -- which had a darker, 1970s feel.

Toward the end of Reagan's second term, 1987's Wall Street examined the pathologies of the new money culture through the character of Gordon Gekko, who famously said, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good."

Based on brat pack writer Jay McInerney's 1984 novel of the same name, Bright Lights, Big City took a look at young love -- and loss -- in the city in 1988:

Working Girl, with Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver, and about a million giant shoulderpads and pussy-bow blouses, in 1988 looked at a new kind of female character in town:

And brat pack writer Tama Janowitz saw her 1986 collection of short stories Slaves of New York adapted into an 1989 Hollywood tale of love, art and real estate in the East Village and Lower East Side. (Apparently bed bugs have replaced fleas since then, but New Yorkers have always been at war with the vermin.)

The East Village bohemia of Slaves of New York is a world better represented in Maripol's Downtown 81 (you can watch the whole thing on YouTube), starring a 19-year-old Jean Michel Basquiat, which was only recently released despite being filmed decades ago. It's very documentary about the scene, even if only loosely organized about a narrative.

The Bonfire of the Vanities was very much a part of the story of Koch's New York and the conflict between new money and settled-in decline, though released in 1990:

The opening shot is celebrated for being an amazing tracking shot, but it's also notable to a contemporary viewer for its extravagant celebration of a writer as a personality -- something which now seems as antique as the mutton-sleeve arms on those '80s dresses.

Metropolitan, released in 1990 about the fading world of Upper East Side debutantes, was also part of Ed Koch's New York. I know because one of the big dinner scenes was filmed in City Hall after hours, I'm pretty sure in the late fall or winter of 1989. (I was assistant wardrobe mistress on the film and recently discovered in my archives a giant stack of black and white photos of that night's scenes, at any rate. No idea why I have them -- I suspect they were unused promotional stills.)

But perhaps the last word should go to the mayor. He died on the same day a documentary of his life is set to open in New York. Titled, simply, Koch, Neil Barsky's documentary is something I now can't wait to see.

Update: Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list, so please do add your own favorites and recommendations in the comments.

Sometimes art and life collide in ways that make your head spin, as in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's tweeting of the final episode of 30 Rock, in which she guest-starred Thursday night.

Jack Donaghy is an economic war criminal. #30Rock twitter.com/NancyPelosi/st...

— Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) February 1, 2013

"I would do almost anything Tina Fey asks me to do," Pelosi told The Washington Post of her star-turn, which was filmed in early December.

Decades after the left and Democrats went through wrenching debates about language and respect, the Republican Party is struggling to rein in its sharper tongues.

In 2004, William S. Lind of the Free Congress Foundation wrote a short intellectual history of the term "politically correct" that well encapsulates the long-standing conservative defense of speech -- and ideas -- that run contrary to those espoused by the new social movements that have been transforming America since the 1960s.

"[W]hat happens today to Americans who suggest that there are differences among ethnic groups, or that the traditional social roles of men and women reflect their different natures, or that homosexuality is morally wrong?" he asked. "If they are public figures, they must grovel in the dirt in endless, canting apologies...What was their crime? Contradicting America's new state ideology of 'Political Correctness.'"

Or as Geoffrey Hughes put it in his 2009 book Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture, "Political correctness inculcates a sense of obligation or conformity in areas which should be (or are) matters of choice."

But now the decades-long conservative opposition to political correctness is finally breaking down. In the wake of Mitt Romney's solid defeat by Barack Obama, the Republican Party has been forced into a series of wrenching internal debates about how to appeal to a wider array of voters, especially the women and minorities who elevated the president to a second term. It's an effort being led by some of the party's own most prominent minority voices, as well as some of its more urbane strategists, with the goal of reining in the most offensive GOP speakers and squashing their provoking uses of language.

The latest instance of intra-party pushback came from Nevada Republican Party on Thursday, which warned in a statement of principles and strategy: "All are entitled to their opinions, but today's priorities not those of the past must prevail if the Republican Party is to regain the trust of Nevada's voters. As Congressman Mark Amodei (and Dr. Einstein) noted, 'insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.' We must change if we are to survive."

In particular, the party noted: "The GOP has increasingly found itself in positions that do not meet the demographic realities of the State's electorate. These positions also conflict with our party's historic commitment to civil rights. To that end, Republicans must become more inclusive, reflecting our desire to secure a better life for all Americans, and equally important, for our children."

The net result: "We support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants." No longer is the conversation about "illegal immigrants," as the Las Vegas Review-Journal calls them -- but about "undocumented" ones. As with Lind's essay, the connection is clear -- language and policy are inextricably bound together, for the use of language describes not just the subject of speech but the stance of the speaker toward the subject. And both those are bound up with the demographic changes the Democratic Party has been absorbing since the 1980s.

The Hispanic Leadership Network urged attentiveness to language in the immigration debate in a memo released earlier in the week, as well. Those engaged in the debate must be more cautious with their buzzwords, they warned. "Do use 'undocumented immigrant' when referring to those here without documentation," they said. "Don't use the word 'illegals' or 'aliens.' Don't use the term 'anchor baby.'"

Further, the group said, it would be wise for Republicans to avoid "phrases like 'send them all back', 'electric fence', 'build a wall along the entire border'."

Earlier in January, Politico ran a piece after Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey sought to sympathetically interpret what he thought failed Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin had been saying about "legitimate rape." Their headline: "GOP looks for ways to stop the rape comments."

"This is actually pretty simple. If you're about to talk about rape as anything other than a brutal and horrible crime, stop," former Romney senior adviser Kevin Madden told the paper.

That followed on the heels of Bobby Jindal's remarks in November. "It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments -- enough of that," the Louisiana governor said, also to Politico. "It's not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can't be tolerated within our party. We've also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters."

Republicans needed to "stop being the stupid party," he warned, echoing the exact phrase used by MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough over the summer. "I'm just tired of the Republican Party being the 'Stupid Party!'" Scarborough had said, "Stupid people saying stupid things and scaring off independent voters and swing voters!"

Republicans are quite familiar with tweaking their language to sell conservative policies by making them appear more palatable, and inventing new terms to oppose Democratic ones by heightening the contradictions (think "death tax" or "death panels").

But the new voices of Republican linguistic caution are as much about not alienating voters as about selling anything fresh, policywise. Anyone who went through the PC wars of the 1980s or 1990s in the academy, or followed them from a distance, will recognize the dynamic. In the end, the demand for dignity always wins out. It's just a matter of how long it takes people to realize that speaking in way that's respectful of difference makes it easier for people to hear what the speaker has to say on other matters.

A group founded in 1998 to promote women in politics and help one win the presidency quietly folds, citing the fundraising environment.

Updated 1:10 p.m. "We are sorry to inform you that due to the challenging economic climate The White House Project has had to close its doors," the message on the White House Project website read. And with that, a group that since 1998 has been a prominent voice on behalf of the goal of putting a woman in highest office in the land, as well as many of the lower ones, came to a quiet end on Monday.

"What happened is what's happening around other women's organizations and and other nonprofits.... The math doesn't work after a while," explained White House Project founder Marie Wilson, who gave up the presidency of her group two years ago and is currently working on a book project about "how we need to shift our structures and strategies to keep up with the times."

"I didn't exactly expect to start with my own," she observed. During its 14 years, the group changed how other organizations did business, how women in politics were represented in the popular culture and media, and the number of women who got trained in how to run for office, she said. "We did launch a conversation about the presidency that was unheard of," she added.

"[O]ur work will continue as it transitions to other organizations," the group's outgoing president, Tiffany Dufu, said in an online statement pointing to the Levo League and noting that "Vote Run Lead is being launched as a new organization to continue the political leadership training" previously provided by the White House Project.

The Levo League is a "startup designed to elevate young women in the workforce by providing the career resources needed to achieve personal and professional success," mainly focused on Gen Y women and those just starting their careers. Vote Run Lead describes itself as "the country's largest nonpartisan civic and political training program," and worked in close partnership with the White House Project for the past decade to train women considering in pursuing political careers.

This city is full of flies. Sometimes Obama can knock one off with his bare hands. Sometimes a fly wins.

Remember that time President Obama swatted a fly with his bare hand during an interview with CNBC at the White House and everyone called him a fly ninja?

Well, today the flies had their revenge during presidential remarks at the White House, when one, uh, flew around his head and for a brief, glorious moment -- captured, above, by Reuters photographer Larry Downing -- landed smack in the middle of the presidential forehead.

"This guy is bothering me here," the president said, swatting at the creature.

Despite progress, the circumstances that gave rise to the rebellion that began the contemporary gay rights movement haven't changed as much as we might think.

When President Obama briefly mentioned Stonewall during his Inaugural address, it prompted a lot of chatter about of the Stonewall riot and his historic adoption of the gay rights cause as his own.

But what happened at the Stonewall Inn, really? New York papers tend to call it the Stonewall uprising, not the Stonewall riot, because it played out as six days of skirmishes between young gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals and the New York Police Department in the wake of a police raid of the Christopher Street bar in Manhattan's West Village. The raid came amid a broader police crackdown on gay bars for operating without N. Y. State Liquor Authority licenses, which was something they did only because the SLA refused to grant bars that served gays licenses, forcing them to operate as illegal saloons. Into that void stepped opportunists and Mafia affiliates, who ran the unlicensed establishments and reputedly had deals with the police to stay in business. But on the night of June 27, 1969, a police raid on the Stonewall involving the arrests of 13 people inside the bar met unexpected resistance when a crowd gathered and one of those arrested, a woman, cried out to the assembled bystanders as she was shoved into a paddy wagon, "Why don't you guys do something!"

The conflict over the next six days played out as a very gay variant of a classic New York street rebellion. It would see: fire hoses turned on people in the street, thrown barricades, gay cheerleaders chanting bawdy variants of New York City schoolgirl songs, Rockette-style kick lines in front of the police, the throwing of a firebomb into the bar, a police officer throwing his gun at the mob, cries of "occupy -- take over, take over," "Fag power," "Liberate the bar!", and "We're the pink panthers!", smashed windows, uprooted parking meters, thrown pennies, frightened policemen, angry policemen, arrested mafiosi, thrown cobblestones, thrown bottles, the singing of "We Shall Overcome" in high camp fashion, and a drag queen hitting a police officer on the head with her purse.

The New York Post reported on June 28, 1969, that hundreds outside the bar had been observed chanting "Gay Power" and "We Want Freedom."

David Carter, a historian and author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution has compiled "An Analytical Collation of Accounts and Documents Recorded in the Year 1969 Concerning the Stonewall Riots," from which the above anecdotes are drawn.

Also included in the document roundup is this account by Dick Leitsch, then the executive director of the Mattachine Society of New York, the first gay group to ever hold a picket in the city in the early 1960s. He was also the first gay journalist to describe what happened at Stonewall, dropping his packing for a planned trip to London to spend time on the scene.

Coming on the heels of the raids of the Snake Pit and the Sewer, and the closing of the Checkerboard, the Tele-Star and other clubs, the Stonewall raid looked to many like part of an effort to close all gay bars and clubs in the Village. It may be true that the Checkerboard and Tele-Star died without police assistance. (It is said that the woman who managed the Checkerboard came in one night, ordered all the customers out of the place, cleaned out the cash register and called the police to get rid of those customers who stayed around.) It is very likely that the Sewer and the Snake Pit were raided because they had no licenses, as the police said.

But how are people in the street and the customers of the places to know that? The police don't bother to explain or send press releases to the papers (and when they do, the papers make it seem that the bar was raided because it was gay.)...

Since 1965 the homosexual community of New York has been treated quite well by the City Administration and the police have either reformed or been kept in line by Lindsay and Leary....

Now we've walked in the open and know how pleasant it is to have self-respect and to be treated as citizens and human beings.

...We want to stay in the sunlight from now on. Efforts to force us back in the closet could be disastrous for all concerned.

The above, while a true evaluation of the situation does not explain why the raid on the Stonewall caused such a strong reaction. Why the Stonewall, and not the Sewer or the Snake Pit? The answer lies, we believe, in the unique nature of the Stonewall. This club was more than a dance bar, more than just a gay gathering place. It catered largely to a group of people who are not welcome in, or cannot afford, other places of homosexual social gathering.

The "drags" and the "queens", two groups which would find a chilly reception or a barred door at most of the other gay bars and clubs, formed the "regulars" at the Stonewall. To a large extent, the club was for them.... Apart from the Goldbug and the One Two Three, "drags" and "queens" had no place but the Stonewall....

Another group was even more dependent on the Stonewall: the very young homosexuals and those with no other homes. You've got to be 18 to buy a drink in a bar, and gay life revolved around bars. Where do you go if you are 17 or 16 and gay? The "legitimate" bars won't let you in the place, and gay restaurants and the streets aren't very sociable.

Then too, there are hundreds of young homosexuals in New York who literally have no home. Most of them are between 16 and 25, and came here from other places without jobs, money or contacts. Many of them are running away from unhappy homes (one boy told us, "My father called me 'cocksucker so many times, I thought it was my name."). Another said his parents fought so much over which of them "made" him a homosexual that he left so they could learn to live together.

Some got thrown out of school or the service for being gay and couldn't face going home. Some were even thrown out of their homes with only the clothes on their backs by ignorant, intolerant parents who'd rather see their kid dead than homosexual.

They came to New York with the clothes on their backs. Some of them hustled, or had skills enough to get a job. Others weren't attractive enough to hustle, and didn't manage to fall in with people who could help them. Some of them, giddy at the openness of gay life in New York, got caught up in it and some are on pills and drugs. Some are still wearing the clothes in which they came here a year or more ago.

Jobless and without skills--without decent clothes to wear to a job interview--they live in the streets, panhandling or shoplifting for the price of admission to the Stonewall. That was the one advantage to the place--for $3.00 admission, one could stay inside, out of the winter's cold or the summer heat, all night long. Not only was the Stonewall better climatically, but it also saved the kids from spending the night in a doorway or from getting arrested as vagrants.

Three dollars isn't too hard to get panhandling, and nobody hustled drinks in the Stonewall. Once the admission price was paid, one could drink or not, as he chose. The Stonewall became "home" to these kids. When it was raided, they fought for it. That, and the fact that they had nothing to lose other than the most tolerant and broadminded gay place in town, explains why the Stonewall riots were begun, led and spearheaded by "queens".

In short, in this account, the Stonewall operated as a sort of de facto community center for gay youth rendered homeless by familial and institutional rejection, who had taken refuge in New York City in hopes of finding a place where they could be in the world. This continues, decades later, to be a major problem, according to a study by the Williams Institute, which found in 2012 that about 40 percent of clients served by 354 youth service agencies were gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, and that the top reasons they were homeless were that they ran away in the face of family rejection or were kicked out by parents who could not accept their sexual orientation or gender identities.

As Obama's comments showed, there's been a lot of progress on the acceptance of sexual minorities since the Stonewall era. But there's still a long way to go until the background of ill-treatment of young LGBT people that helped give rise to the Stonewall rebellion ceases to be a problem.

A grayer, grimmer, more experienced Obama kicks off his second term by bringing back the Hope.

Just hours before a group of well-heeled Obama supporters with silver tickets trooped across the spot, a crew from the Masonry Division of the Architect of the Capitol was wiggling a loose paver back even with grade above the stairs of the West Front of the building.

Down below, a skein of wires flowed around the scaffolding that held aloft the still and video cameras of the visual press; on the other side of the door at the bottom of the construction was the platform area for the seated press, spouses of members of Congress, staffers and honored guests. Among them: a group of aged Tuskegee airmen, snug under khaki blankets in their wheelchairs, wearing the kind of glasses I've seen on my dad and come to think of as Veteran's Administration dispensary-style.

Though I arrived in D.C. in Clinton's first term, this was the first Inauguration I've attended. I'll have more to say later about the speeches -- not only the first time a president has used the word "gay" in an inaugural address, but likely the first time the word "namaste" was spoken from the inaugural stage (by poet Richard Blanco).

But first a word about the ceremony itself.

Television makes everything look more glamorous. It is a trick of the light.

There's a lot of talk on a day like today of the pomp and ceremony of state. But there was something charmingly plain about the inaugural ceremony itself. The fanciest thing about it was the heavy paper stock for the tickets (for those who had tickets), with their high-tech security hologram, and the enormously complex identifications badges required for Capitol access. (To get one, you had to go to the Government Printing Office for a fingerprint scan, then sit there until the F.B.I. ran your prints through their databases back in West Virginia, clearing the agent in Washington to sign off on your credentialing form.) The security perimeters that have turned downtown Washington, D.C., into a semblance of Tampa or Charlotte during the national political conventions may be complicated affairs to staff and build, but the American security state when it descends upon a town also has all the majesty of a T.S.A. screening station, perhaps in unconscious honor of our Puritan ancestors' rebellion against finery and design.

At the inauguration, those who had seats all sat in the same black plastic "Eventwares" chairs ("as low as $10.95" online). Many stood near the stage, as well as above it, and in standing-room only throngs that stretched back to the Washington Monument and beyond. They'd begun their day early, then stood or sat in the cold for hours (though the day began promisingly bright, the temperature dipped and the crowd started shivering by noon) to catch a direct or jumbotron glimpse of a ceremony that itself lasted less time than the wait for it. Cellphone signals crashed, and thousands of Twitpics and texts were doubtless left unsent.

Reporters compared notes about Inaugurations past -- that time it was 10 degrees colder, or that time it rained and the ground below the high-dollar donors turned to mud -- and complained of the challenges of finding a story on a day designed for, as one put it, "Savannah and Norah and Matt Lauer."

Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, gave the tradition affirmation of America's peaceful transfer of power. "How remarkable that this has survived for so long in such a complex country with so much power at stake -- this freedom to vote for our leaders and the restraint to respect the results," he said.

Power of a different sort was all around in the personalities near the stage, from former president Clinton to the Supreme Court justices and members of Congress to Cyndi Lauper and Eva Longoria. Beyonce, the internationally famous singer, belted out "The Star-Spangled Banner" that closed a ceremony that opened with an invocation by Myrlie Evers-Williams, whose life stands as testament to a different sort of power -- that of citizens.

Obama invoked the power of those citizens, and while it is usually an unoriginal political trope to do so, the fact that his election and re-election were so dependent on turnout by those less connected to the political system made his phrases seem more authentic. "You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country's course," Obama said. "You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time -- not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals."

Most importantly, though, his speech signaled openly what's been clear for some time now -- Obama's second term will show him being a more progressive force than did his first, and will see him continue to press the kind of bolder (but also politically astute) cultural stances he began to advocate during the campaign with his support for gay marriage and undocumented youngsters.

The speech's key passage invoked the spirit of activism, social change and the unending fight for human dignity that each generation renews:

peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes:  tolerance and opportunity, human dignity and justice. 

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths -- that all of us are created equal -- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.  (Applause.) It is now our generation's task to carry on what those pioneers began.  For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts.  (Applause.)  Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law  -- (applause) -- for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.  (Applause.)  Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.  (Applause.)  Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity -- (applause) -- until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country.  (Applause.)   Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm. 

 

That is our generation's task -- to make these words, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.

He may have mentioned the word only a few times, and without rhetorical flourish, but it was still clear: the grayer, grimmer, more experienced Obama of the second term wanted to kick it off by bringing back the Hope.

Legendary political journalist Richard Ben Cramer has passed away. In July 1992, at the age of 42, he sat down with Brian Lamb of C-SPAN for Booknotes to discuss how he wrote his then just-published masterwork, What It Takes: The Way to the White House.

Below, he discusses his method:

LAMB: How did you get a publisher to put out that size book?

CRAMER: The size of the book wasn't really a problem once you got them involved with the idea. It was my idea from the first to try to write a real human story about these guys and try to let people connect with them in a visceral way so that they felt with them and exulted with them and felt their tragedy and their triumph. By the time I started feeding manuscript into the publisher, everybody was on board and they really weren't too worried about the length. The hard part was in the beginning, trying to sell a book like this. As I'm sure your viewers know, most books are signed up and contracted for before they are written. In this case, I had to go to a publisher, Random House, and tell them, "Well, look, I don't have Chapter One yet and I don't have an outline for you. I can't tell you who the characters will be yet. I can't tell you what the story will be, but you just give me all this money and I'll see you in four or five years. Don't worry. It'll be great." So once you sell a book like that, after that convincing them about the length is just a walk in the park.

LAMB: This book costs $28 to buy if you don't buy it in a discount store.

CRAMER: That's right, although it is being discounted, a practice of which I approve.

LAMB: Is it true that you got a half million dollar advance?

CRAMER: I can't contractually tell you exactly what the advance is, but you're not far wrong.

LAMB: I read that you'd spent it all, too, over that six years.

CRAMER: Oh, yes. Well, you know how it is. If you're following candidates in a campaign, you get on their plane, and what they're generally doing is they're dividing the cost of that charter flight by the number of reporters they're carrying aboard. In effect, the press is buying them that campaign flight. This doesn't seem to matter when it's Kay Graham's money or Otis Chandler's money, but when it's cash out of your own pocket, you begin to feel it. So you could say, in the immortal words of Jerry Lee Lewis, "I spent the hell out of it."

LAMB: Are you happy with this book?

CRAMER: I am. I'm happy with the way it came out because I've been able to see in the few weeks that it's been out that people are connecting with it, and they're getting a fresh look at these guys. They're finding out that they really didn't know them as they thought they did and that they really hadn't seen them as human beings in the same way that they do now that they've read the book, so that's very pleasing to me.

....

LAMB: It's unfair to somebody who hasn't read this thing, why I would ask that question. Anybody who reads this book will have, I'm positive, the same reaction. How did you get the access?

CRAMER: You cannot overestimate my ignorance at the start of this process. I started out doing it as I thought Washington big-time political reporters do these kind of things -- calling up important people in Washington whom I had seen quoted in the papers or seen as talking heads on TV. I wanted to ask them about these candidates because I didn't really care that much about the campaign -- how did they win and how did they lose, etc. I really wanted to know these men, and I wanted to know what kind of life brought them to the point where they could be candidates. When I finally did force my way into a few of the offices of these important Washington figures and I started asking about the candidates, I found that they really didn't know these guys. They knew them in a kind of Washington way. They'd been in a couple of meetings with them or they'd been at a dinner party where this guy was the speaker or they had seen them on the floor of the House or Senate a few times, but they didn't know what made the guy tick. They didn't know why he was in politics. They didn't know what was driving him onward or what was the real reason that he was climbing to the top of the pyramid.

Eventually, after a period of months, I pretty much abandoned Washington. I went to the hometowns, and then I started talking to their schoolmates and their sisters and brothers and their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and cousins and their first employers and their Cub Scout leaders and their teachers and their law school buddies and college roommates. By the time I got back to the candidates on the campaign trail, I wasn't asking them how many points did they need in Iowa. I was asking them about their Aunt Lucy or their Aunt Gladys. She said they never would wake up in the morning when they spent a summer with her. Now they start their campaign days at 5:30 a.m. What got into these guys? So I was talking to them about life, not politics, and that started us on a different relationship.

If you haven't read his book on the 1988 presidential campaign, here are two good entry points to his oeuvre:

* "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?" -- Esquire, 1986

* "Can the Best Mayor Win?" -- Esquire, 1984

All you people trying to yoke the 1991 feminist movie to the fiscal-cliff negotiations seem to have forgotten that it's a vigilante fantasy about rape culture -- and ends badly.

How's this for cultural amnesia: Politico's Jonathan Allen wrote this morning of fiscal cliff negotiations: "If they go over the cliff, they'll do it together. But it won't be some happy Thelma-and-Louise-style climax."

Happy?

Has anyone actually watched Thelma & Louise lately?

The 1991 movie is about two women who go on the lam after one saves the other from an attempted rape by shooting the attacker. Convinced the police won't believe them, they set out to drive to Mexico. But they don't make it, and the film ends with the two driving off the edge of a cliff in a 1966 Thunderbird, committing suicide. Thelma & Louise was part of the Anita Hill moment that gave rise to the so-called "Year of the Woman" and Bill Clinton's election. It was about women's self-realization and self-defense -- a kind of feminist fantasy of women vigilantes taking on a world pictured as stultifyingly male-dominated and full of violence against women. (For context: The landmark Violence Against Women Act would not pass until 1994, and it took feminist activists outraged by the mass rapes in the Balkans following the break-up of Yugoslavia until 2008 to get the United Nations to declare rape a weapon of war.)

"It wasn't personal experience so much as it was a feeling about the way things were in the world," screenwriter Callie Khouri told NPR in 2011 of what she was trying to get at with the movie. "And looking around and saying supposedly women are making all these great strides toward equality, but let's be honest: It's still very much a man's world and you're still looked at through a very narrow filter. And if you step out of line the punishment is severe. And this movie speaks to that feeling I think that women have of not being looked at as 100 percent whole human beings."

The only real reason we're even now talking about Thelma & Louise is because: a) the movie includes a scene with a cliff and b) Republicans who lost two otherwise winnable U.S. Senate seats thanks to their tone-deaf comments on rape decided that turning one of the iconic feminist films of the early 1990s into a partisan insult would be a good messaging strategy for a party facing a terrible gender gap. Talk about your people who "just didn't get it" -- to use the term of art of that bygone era.

"House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other Republican leaders are already complaining about the president's  'Thelma and Louise economic strategy,'" the Washington Post's Lori Montgomery reported on October 17.

While some of the earlier fall references to the movie portrayed it reasonably accurately, they were, notably, turns of phrase used by men who were rather obviously not part of the film's target demographic. "Thelma and Louise are about to drive off the cliff, in one last climactic scene of independence and stupidity. You don't have to rent the DVD because our very own federal government is heading toward the fiscal cliff. It should be spectacular," said the economists at the First Trust Ecobomics Blog on October 8. Writing in the Daily Beast, Daniel Gross on November 20 declared, "Some people, left, center, and right, believe careening over the cliff would be an affirmative good, a willful act of liberation, a step that is necessary to rationalize our tax code. I've dubbed these folks the Thelma & Louise Caucus. And I count myself a member."

The Republican National Committee decided the phrase was felicitous enough to keep pushing in late November. It launched a page on November 27 attacking "The Thelma And Louise Democrats," after sending out an email with that subject line. It followed that up with emails on November 28 declaring, "As The Thelma And Louise Democrats Are In Disarray About Entitlement Reform, The Fiscal Cliff Comes In To View," and November 30, arguing, "The Election Is Over, But Obama Is On The Campaign Trail In Pennsylvania Nearly A Month Before The Thelma And Louise Democrats Plunge Us Over The Cliff."

The Republican Thelma & Louise messaging continued on December 4:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell even addressed the U.S. Senate on November 26 to decry "the 'Thelma and Louise' crowd."

How we get from there to Thelma & Louise's happy ending is somewhat less than clear. What is certain, though, is that the film had a great deal meaning for women of a certain generation. And the GOP, in particular, might want to think about what the movie evokes for female voters, beyond just memories of a scene of two women in a car facing a cliff.

Handwritten messages on coffee cup sleeves in Washington, D.C., are urging residents to "Come Together" to address the fiscal cliff and national debt.

The first Twitter report came from Lyndsey Fifield, a social media and outreach manager at the D.C.-based CRAFT digital media firm, on December 15:

My barista hand wrote "come together" on my sleeve. Said all Starbucks on the hill were told to #fiscalclif instagr.am/p/TQrSr7gYy5/

— Lyndsey Fifield (@lyndseyfifield) December 15, 2012

The barista, Fifield wrote me in a follow-up tweet, was "was shockingly well versed on #fiscalcliff and [Starbucks CEO] Howard Schultz."

Now the small-scale effort to urge Republicans and Democrats to "come together" to avoid the fiscal cliff is official company policy for the approximately 120 Washington, D.C.-area stores for the remainder of final workweek of the year. Schultz made the announcement on the Starbucks blog this morning:

Rather than be bystanders, we have an opportunity--and I believe a responsibility--to use our company's scale for good by sending a respectful and optimistic message to our elected officials to come together and reach common ground on this important issue. This week through December 28, partners in our Washington D.C. area stores are writing "Come Together" on customers' cups.

It's a small gesture, but the power of small gestures is what Starbucks is about! Imagine the power of our partners and hundreds of thousands of customers each sharing such a simple message, one cup at a time.

Never before have we asked our partners to write something specific on our customers' cups. These words express the optimism that's core to the holiday season, to our country's heritage, and to our Starbucks Mission. This effort is also being amplified by our friends at AOL and Patch who are joining us in activating their hyper-local network of websites to share the "Come Together" message.

"Schultz is part of the well-funded [Campaign to] Fix the Debt group, members of which have met with White House officials and House Republican leaders," National Journal reports. It's not clear what kind of impact the Sharpie-written messages might have, what with the House still being out of session for the remainder of the week and Obama only scheduled get back from Hawaii Thursday. But lack of immediate impact won't deter the force behind D.C.'s latest microlobbying campaign. "If (the talks) do not progress, we will make this much bigger," Schultz told Reuters about the hand-written messages.

He might need to take the effort national if he really wants to reach people during this holiday season: White House reporter Michael Memoli, traveling with the president in Hawaii, noted in a pool report this afternoon that he'd "stopped at Starbucks, where my coffee cup is free of fiscal cliff-related messaging."

Via Christina Bellantoni, here's what today's version of the campaign looks locally:

The Starbucks announcement got a fair bit of attention among the D.C. Twitterati this morning, as well, much of it lightly mocking. My favorite response so far comes from @HuffPoHill:

"You paid five dollars for this cup of coffee and you're supposed to fix our country's fiscal problems?"

— HuffPost Hill (@HuffPostHill) December 26, 2012

The CEO of the gun industry lobbying group's call for the placement of armed guards in schools followed a well-worn sales script.

Anyone expecting the NRA to be chastened at all by the shooting in Newtown, Conn., was quickly disabused of that expectation as Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the gun industry and enthusiast lobbying group, delivered a blistering speech effectively arguing today for a major expansion of the market for the product his group represents.

It was an extraordinarily tone deaf performance, but it followed a well-worn script for product sales: Provoke anxiety -- and pitch your product as the one and only solution to it. Here's what it all boiled down to:

THE SET-UP

....schools are their safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk....when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family -- our children -- we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters -- people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. ...does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn't planning his attack on a school he's already identified at this very moment? How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame -- from a national media machine that rewards them with the wall-to-wall attention and sense of identity that they crave -- while provoking others to try to make their mark? A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation's refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill? ...Killers, robbers, rapists and drug gang members...have spread like cancer in every community in this country....Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you've got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization. ...Isn't fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography? In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes -- every minute of every day of every month of every year. ...when you hear the glass breaking in your living room at 3 a.m. and call 911, you won't be able to pray hard enough for a gun in the hands of a good guy to get there fast enough to protect you.

And THE SELL

The only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. ...With all the foreign aid, with all the money in the federal budget, we can't afford to put a police officer in every school? Even if they did that, politicians have no business -- and no authority -- denying us the right, the ability, or the moral imperative to protect ourselves and our loved ones from harm. ...I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school -- and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January. ...the National Rifle Association, as America's preeminent trainer of law enforcement and security personnel for the past 50 years, is ready, willing and uniquely qualified to help... act now.

The office of New York City Mayor Bloomberg, a leader of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, tweeted "Instead of solutions to a problem they have helped create, @NRA offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America."

But that was the whole point. Offer fear in a time of mourning -- and propose your product as the solution at a time when others say it's the problem. It's called advocacy, and it's why LaPierre gets paid nearly $1 million a year.

A stark video with echoes of "Yes We Can" stars an impressive array of boldface names in a spot for Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Think of it as the gun control movement's counter to Wayne LaPierre.

Sure, everyone loves Clinton now. But first she had to survive a decade and a half of right-wing attacks.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice has withdrawn her name from consideration for nomination to be secretary of state. "If nominated, I am now convinced that the confirmation process would be lengthy, disruptive and costly," she said in a letter formally taking herself out of consideration.

And with that admission, the woman who would succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state has revealed she's gotten just a small taste of what it actually has been like to be Hillary Clinton over the years.

Rice, like Clinton before her, has been attacked relentlessly by the GOP for what she's said, for her temperament, and over her financial ties; she's been attacked by left and right alike for her foreign-policy views (the criticism of Rice's ties to African despots has been nothing compared to the intra-party criticism Clinton got for backing the authorization of military use force in Iraq, launching Bush's war there); and she's been denied an upsurge of support from her party just when she positioned herself or her ideas as most inevitable (from Hillarycare to the 2008 presidential contest, Clinton's never been so vulnerable as when she's been inevitable). Like Clinton, Rice also has been subjected to a steady stream of rough questioning in the MSM and excoriated on Fox. But unlike Clinton, Rice has experienced all of this only on a small scale and for a only few months.

Hillary Clinton went through 15 years of this stuff before becoming, under Obama, the woman everyone loves, a woman whom Chris Cillizza just dubbed "the new Teflon Clinton." It was only a few years ago she was "likable enough," according to Obama -- a woman whose "vocal range" revealed her to be "the stereotypical bitch," as Glenn Beck put it.

So Susan Rice once gave Richard Holbrooke the finger. She certainly wasn't the only person to jab a finger in his direction on account of his "outsize" personality, according to James Mann's The Obamians. Clinton was accused of murdering Vince Foster! Even now that's a charge even being repeated on right-wing blogs, thanks to a new book out at the end of November on the former Clinton lawyer.

"I am grateful that Susan will continue to serve as our Ambassador at the United Nations and a key member of my cabinet and national security team, carrying her work forward on all of these and other issues," Obama said in a statement accepting Rice's letter. "I have every confidence that Susan has limitless capability to serve our country now and in the years to come, and know that I will continue to rely on her as an advisor and friend. While I deeply regret the unfair and misleading attacks on Susan Rice in recent weeks, her decision demonstrates the strength of her character, and an admirable commitment to rise above the politics of the moment to put our national interests first."

The two will meet on Friday, a White House source confirms.

Rice may have been just been thwarted in her hoped for next move in the Democratic foreign policy world. But if there's any lesson in Clinton's career, keeping on keeping on has a way of taking a gal in some amazing directions no matter what people say -- and no matter who goes out of their way to block her. As Tina Fey so memorably noted all those years ago about the woman now hailed for her diplomatic finesse, "Bitch is the new black."

The man dissented when the Supreme Court ruled that gay sex was not a moral crime. His views on the issue are longstanding and plain.

Once again this week, conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia outraged liberals by saying something impolitic and offensive about gays. People need to recognize that Scalia's views in this area are not news. It's been his carefully considered legal judgment, laid out for nearly a decade in comments and rulings from the bench, that widely shared negative moral judgments are an acceptable basis for legislative action under the U.S. Constitution, and that the fact that negative sentiments about homosexuality have historically been the dominant view ought to be accorded significant weight in considering cases involving it.

The interesting thing to follow as the Court considers two new cases involving the fate of same-sex marriage -- and really, in the years ahead, as well -- is how Scalia reacts to the growing change in public opinion about gay relationships and the growing legislative success of the gay-marriage movement. To the extent that he has continually based his conservative judicial statements about gays on the Anglo-American historical record -- which he accurately describes as deeply opposed to homosexuality as a matter of public policy -- what might changes in public opinion and state legislation mean for his judicial views?

The AP reported on Scalia's latest finger in the eye of contemporary opinion:

Speaking at Princeton University, Scalia was asked by a gay student why he equates laws banning sodomy with those barring bestiality and murder.

"I don't think it's necessary, but I think it's effective," Scalia said, adding that legislative bodies can ban what they believe to be immoral.

Scalia has been giving speeches around the country to promote his new book, "Reading Law," and his lecture at Princeton comes just days after the court agreed to take on two cases that challenge the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

Some in the audience who had come to hear Scalia speak about his book applauded but more of those who attended the lecture clapped at freshman Duncan Hosie's question.

"It's a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the 'reduction to the absurd,'" Scalia told Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. "If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?"

Scalia said he is not equating sodomy with murder but drawing a parallel between the bans on both.

Cue the outrage machine! Scalia is comparing gay sex with murder! Except that he wasn't -- not really. He was, provocatively (and with what would seem a clear intention to annoy), asking what the basis of legal bans is. Many would answer, harm to individuals. Scalia was echoing what has been his longstanding position: that centuries of moral sentiment are an adequate basis for upholding laws under the Constitution. Already in 2003 a majority of the Supreme Court disagreed with him -- and that's why his legal thinking on these issues has not been the law of the land for some time.

Tuesday was hardly the first time Scalia has made the case for the constitutionality of commonly held disapprobations as carrying more weight than contemporary petitions for relief from democratic (if not demographic) minorities (i.e., those who are underrepresented in elective office and have not been able to use legislative bodies or democratic elections to find relief). Here's the justice just last October in remarks at the American Enterprise Institute:

"The death penalty? Give me a break. It's easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state," Scalia said...

But most important in understanding Scalia's thinking was his 2003 dissent, joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas, in the Lawrence v. Texas ruling that overturned the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision upholding the constitutionality of state anti-sodomy statutes. Wrote Scalia in his dissent:

Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct. It seems to me that the "societal reliance" on the principles confirmed in Bowers and discarded today has been overwhelming. Countless judicial decisions and legislative enactments have relied on the ancient proposition that a governing majority's belief that certain sexual behavior is "immoral and unacceptable" constitutes a rational basis for regulation. ... State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers' validation of laws based on moral choices....

[T]he Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed. Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive. The Court views it as "discrimination" which it is the function of our judgments to deter. So imbued is the Court with the law profession's anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously "mainstream"; that in most States what the Court calls "discrimination" against those who engage in homosexual acts is perfectly legal....

"Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means," Scalia wrote. "Social perceptions of sexual and other morality change over time, and every group has the right to persuade its fellow citizens that its view of such matters is the best."

What he dissented from in Lawrence was "the invention of a brand-new 'constitutional right' by a Court that is impatient of democratic change."

The key question in the months ahead: Now that gay marriage and gay rights are being legislatively upheld by individual state legislatures and ballot initiatives, will Scalia support allowing the states the freedom to decide their laws, one by one, according to the moral judgments of their voting citizens? Or will he seek to use the Supreme Court to uphold a federal law -- the Defense of Marriage Act -- to impose a historic negative moral judgment on gays who seek federal recognition for the marital relationships states now permit them to have?

"I would no more require a State to criminalize homosexual acts -- or, for that matter, display any moral disapprobation of them -- than I would forbid it to do so .... [I]t is the premise of our system that those judgments are to be made by the people, and not imposed by a governing caste that knows best," Scalia wrote in 2003.

How the staunch defender of democratic processes deals with actual democratic changes in the years ahead will be fascinating to watch.

The president's hard line on the Bush tax cuts represents the first major test case for his theory that the GOP "fever" can be broken in his second term.

Obama arrives to deliver a statement on the fiscal cliff in the East Room of the White House three days after being re-elected. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Goodbye, conciliator. Hello, Mr. Tough Love.

If Republicans are unwilling to compromise on allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire, America is going to go over the fiscal cliff at the end of the year. Whether out of firm belief or firm belief in saying it as a negotiating strategy, President Obama has made it abundantly clear that this is one area where he will not budge.

"Administration officials ... hardened their insistence that Obama is willing to take the nation over the cliff rather than give in to Republicans and extend the tax cuts for upper-income earners," the Associated Press reported Monday.

"We're going to have to see the rates on the top two percent go up. And we're not going to be able to get a deal without it," Obama told Bloomberg's Julianna Goldman on Tuesday.

"There's no prospect for an agreement that doesn't involve those rates going up on the top two percent of the wealthiest," Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday. The administration is "absolutely" prepared to go over the fiscal cliff, he said.

In case there was any doubt, Obama repeated his position Thursday. "Just to be clear, I'm not going to sign any package that somehow prevents the top rate from going up for folks at the top 2 percent," he said during an event with a middle-class Northern Virginia family set up by the White House to press the president's case.

While Republicans are bemoaning the president's intransigence in hewing fast to a position he ran and won on in 2012, they might do well to look to their own behavior in setting up this month's epic power struggle with him -- and why he feels he's now in a strong enough position to stand firm on behalf of his agenda.

Obama laid out a theory for how his second term might go in remarks to donors at the Bachelor Farmer Restaurant in Minneapolis on June 1:

In this election, the Republican Party has moved in a fundamentally different direction. The center of gravity for their party has shifted. And so things that we used to be able to take for granted, that's been more difficult to take for granted over the last three-and-a-half years.

And let's just take one example: deficit reduction. We have a significant long-term debt that has to be dealt with. Now, our top priority should be putting people to work right now, because if our economy is growing faster, that actually will help reduce the deficit. But there's no doubt that it's unsustainable for us to keep on having health care costs in Medicare and Medicaid go up 6, 8, 10 percent, when the overall inflation rate and growth rate are coming in lower. That's a recipe for long-term disaster.

So what we've said is, look, let's cut out waste; let's streamline programs; let's reorganize government where we can. Let's end the war in Iraq; let's wind down the war in Afghanistan. Let's use some of those savings for deficit reduction. Let's tackle Medicare and Medicaid in an intelligent way that preserves this critical social safety net but also achieves significant savings. And let's ask those of us who've been most fortunate just to pay a little bit more. And if we put that package together we can achieve $4 trillion of savings and we can pay right now to rebuild our roads and our bridges, and rehire some teachers, and grow the economy right now. We can package that together to make progress.

And we couldn't get them to take yes for an answer -- because, ideologically, the notion of billionaires and millionaires paying a little bit more in taxes didn't adhere to the philosophy that they've been fighting for over the last several years.

Now, I believe that if we're successful in this election -- when we're successful in this election -- that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope and my expectation is that after the election, now that it turns out the goal of beating Obama doesn't make much sense because I'm not running again -- that we can start getting some cooperation again, and we're not going to have people raising their hands and saying -- or refusing to accept a deal where there's $10 of cuts for every dollar of tax increases, but that people will accept a balanced plan for deficit reduction.

To summarize: If the "fever" of hard-line GOP opposition were to break, it would be on the question of revenues in advance of what would be a give and take on entitlements and a broader deficit reduction package. But in Obama's telling the fever would not be something brought down by endless negotiation. It would break when the GOP came around on raising taxes.

In addition to not budging on raising tax rates for the top 2 percent of earners, Obama has said he will not negotiate major budget cuts for the sort of debt-ceiling increases routinely granted to his predecessors. Reported Politico Wednesday of a meeting between Obama and the Business Roundtable:

The president also told the group that he would not allow Republicans in Congress to try and barter a debt-ceiling increase in exchange for more spending cuts, noting that the horse-trading alone over an increase last year sent the economy reeling.

"We can't afford to go there again," he said. "...The only thing the debt ceiling is good as a weapon for is destroying your credit rating... I will not play that game."

Here's the hand that's strengthening Obama's resolve:

1. He just won re-election having campaigned on getting rid of the Bush tax cuts for the top earners as a central plank of his next steps for the economy.

2. The majority of the public supports his position. A Quinnipiac poll released Dec. 6 showed Americans favored raising taxes on households earning more than $250,000 per year 65 percent to 31 percent.

3. Polling shows the public will blame the GOP for failure to come to a deal, raising taxes on all Americans. A recent Pew Research Center for the People & the Press/Washington Post poll found 53 percent said congressional Republicans would be more to blame if there's no deal by Jan. 1, while only 27 percent said they'd lay blame at the feet of Obama.

4. Obama is much more popular than Congress overall. Quinnipiac reports him with a 53 percent approval rating, while Congress has only a 9 percent approval rating, according to survey research from the Center on Congress at Indiana University.

5. If taxes go up, it will happen right at the moment Americans are feeling most financially strapped, thanks to the holidays, though it also won't happen in the first paycheck of the new year for most people.

6. No one wants to bankrupt America's charities, whether one could get the amount of desired revenue from capping deductions on charitable donations or not, just to keep tax cuts for the wealthy. Too many people rely on them for services. So that means that GOP strategy of relying on deductions is out, unless a Republican Party trying to recover from being painted as a bunch of scrooges and meanies during 2012 thinks it will help with a comeback to weaken private-sector funding for hospitals, schools, and arts groups to preserve tax cuts for the wealthy.

7. Obama is able to prosecute his case on the tax cuts and the debt ceiling with the public using all the tools and freshly organized power of his successfully concluded political campaign and the full power of the presidential bully pulpit, combined. The #My2K hashtag, the GOPHostageTakers.com site, the tweeting, the meeting with regular Americans -- it all has a familiar flavor.

8. Obama will have an even bigger platform for his views in January, thanks to the Inauguration on Jan. 21 and the timing of his annual State of the Union address.

"The president's idea of a negotiation is, roll over and do what I ask," Speaker John Boehner complained earlier this month. But Obama just solidly won reelection after a very nasty race. Why would he forgo pushing hard for his agenda right out of the gate, right after it was reaffirmed by the public?

The bottom line: The odds we go over the cliff are high if the GOP doesn't come around. Fortunately, it sounds like Republicans are starting to get the message.

The Republicans who object to her claim that protests in Libya preceded four Americans' deaths approved a Senate measure that used similar wording.

Is voting for something in the Senate a less significant statement of beliefs than saying the same thing on a Sunday talk show?

That's the standard the troika of GOP senators leading the charge against U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice is using today. Their comments come in the wake of revelations that they voted by acclimation to sign a measure in September asserting a similar account of the events in Benghazi on September 11 and 12 as laid out by Rice on the Sunday talk shows the weekend after the attack.

The issue might partly be due to bad wording in Senate Resolution 588, which stated in the process of honoring the four Americans who lost their lives in the attack in Libya that "the violence in Benghazi coincided with an attack on the United States Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, which was also swarmed by an angry mob of protesters on September 11, 2012."

That "also" suggests that the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi was swarmed by a mob of protestors like the ones who breached the U.S. embassy in Cairo, rather than a mob of armed militants, some of whom had been inspired to action that evening by media coverage of the protests in Cairo, as has since been reported.

According to ABC News:

The Senate passed a resolution the day after the attack in Benghazi, on Sept. 12, S. Res. 551. The resolution was updated and passed again Sept. 22 to add the names of those who had died. The original resolution and the update were approved by "Unanimous Consent," meaning that all 100 senators were officially listed as sponsors or co-sponsors.

Neither resolution uses the words "terrorist" or "extremist" or "al-Qaeda." Both resolutions use the phrase "swarmed by an angry mob of protestors" to describe the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi.

Several of the resolution's co-sponsors -- including Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., and moderate Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. -- have criticized Susan Rice for using language similar to the Senate resolution in describing the attack days after it happened.

"This president and this administration has either been guilty of colossal incompetence or engaged in a cover-up, neither of which are acceptable to the American people," McCain said Nov. 14. "If someone carried a message to the American people that was totally and utterly false with no basis in fact, then that person also has to be held accountable as well."

The senators have targeted Rice's use of the word "mob" to describe the attack, based on the talking points given to her by the CIA, rather than to admit that it was terrorism...

Ayotte's office says the resolutions' language, which passed in the days after the attack, and that of Rice the Sunday after the attack are not comparable.

"A resolution honoring fallen Americans can't be compared to Ambassador Rice's Sunday show appearances, when she made misleading assertions that al-Qaeda had been 'decimated,' security at the consulate was 'substantial' and the attack was a 'spontaneous' reaction to a 'heinous and offensive video,'" Ayotte spokesman Jeff Grappone told ABC.

Sen. McCain's office called the comparison between the language of the resolution and Rice's words "pathetic."

"This is total nonsense," McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said in a statement to ABC News.

It's all going to come down to just how nervous the less senior members of the House are about facing primary challenges in the most conservative districts.

I was speaking informally with a rather cynical senior Democratic congressional aide recently about the prospect of a fiscal cliff deal before the holidays, which he deemed unlikely, and asked him to send along his thoughts to share with you, dear readers. He turned out to be a bit less cynical upon reflection, and offered up this catalog of three different votes that will matter most as Republicans in the House consider a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff. Here it is:

In a democracy, in the end, it all comes down to the votes. We may spend all our time debating process, policy and punditry, but hey -- at some point you have to cast your ballots and come up with 50 percent plus one.

If Congress is to fix the Fiscal Cliff during the lame duck session, there are three votes that matter. The first is the requirement for Speaker Boehner to get "the majority of the majority" of his House Republican caucus to support the deal. The second is the vote on final passage in the House. And while the final vote won't happen until 2014, the specter of primary challenges to Republicans who vote in favor of a final deal now make the prospected of votes against them then a real player in considerations on the Hill.

Boehner's first challenge is to round up about 150 Republicans to support a deal that will include new revenue. He knows he will lose 60-80 of his most conservative members, so he's going to have to lean pretty hard on the rest of his caucus. And of course, losing 60-80 members of his caucus means he will have to have Democratic support to pass a final bill. If this all sounds familiar, it should. Boehner faced the same dynamic during the government shutdown battle in the spring of 2011 and the debt limit fight that followed that summer.

Those looking for an optimistic ending to the Fiscal Cliff should note that Boehner delivered the votes he needed both times, despite plenty of speculation that he would fall short. However, neither of those votes required raising revenue -- they were both all about cutting spending, which is pretty clearly in the Republican wheelhouse. And yet both bills faced fierce opposition for not cutting enough.

It seems safe to assume that the Republican Study Committee will not be silent on a Fiscal Cliff package that is balanced enough to attract the necessary Democratic support to pass the House. So once a deal is struck, it will have to thread the needle of reforming entitlements enough to satisfy the conservative need for a pound of spending flesh, while also raising enough revenue to satisfy the Democrat's promise to increase taxes on the wealthy. I think we can all agree this will be challenging, but not impossible. (For what happens when Boehner can't thread the needle, please see: Farm Bill, The.) But if such a package is assembled, it will pass the second test -- final passage in the House. And that gets us past this crisis and on to immigration reform!

Eventually, we will arrive at the final votes that matter for this crisis -- those of Republican primary voters. What will happen to Republicans who vote in favor of the deal? On the one hand, if the deal gives industry the confidence to stop hoarding cash and start investing again, it would seem likely that in 18 months, the economy will be growing at a better pace than today, and a stronger economy is always good for incumbents. And, traditionally, a stronger economy will weaken a movement (the Tea Party) that was founded in the midst of a terrible recession.

On the other hand, breaking the Republican orthodoxy of "no new taxes" would seem to be a risky move for any elected official from a conservative district. And gerrymandering has created a LOT of very conservative districts.

So vote number three brings us back to vote number one -- the one that requires a majority of the majority in Boehner's caucus. The fate of a Fiscal Cliff deal during the lame duck will probably rest with the "middle 80," the rank-and-file Republican members who have not accrued gavels or years of service, and who would be the most vulnerable to primary challenges.

Will these Republicans take what is sure to be one of the toughest votes of their time in Washington? Or will they stick with Grover, Rush and the Club for Growth and decide that no deal is better than a tough deal?

So far, Speaker Boehner is two for two. The third time will take quite some charm.

The House of Representatives may have a record number of women legislators next year, but they're mainly to be found in the ranks of out-of-power Democrats.

Congressional leaders, then and now. (Peter Ruta, 1963)

It is an unfortunate side effect of the paucity of Republican women who successfully contend for Congress that GOP wave elections tend to stall the overall advancement of women into the ranks of the House and Senate, while Democratic wave years lift their numbers.

And so it was in 2012. It wasn't quite a wave year for Democrats, but it was a surprisingly good one for them, considering the economic backdrop -- which meant it was a predictably good election for new women in the House and Senate. Thanks to the influx of Democratic women, along with a smattering of Republicans, the U.S. Congress in 2013 will have a record number of women senators and representatives.

But against this backdrop of increasing diversity, the leaders of the major House committees are going to continue to look like attendees of a private social club circa 1963 -- and also the leaders of the House committees in 1963. When the House Republican Steering Committee announced its recommendations for leaders of the major committees Tuesday, every listed figure was a white man.

That's because the House is, as Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday, "an outpost in Democratic-controlled Washington." And the women in Congress are, by a margin of two-to-one, mainly Democrats. In fact, women made up only about 10 percent of House Republicans in the 112th Congress, compared to about 26 percent of House Democrats (there's some minor variation in the numbers across the time period due to resignations and special elections). That puts House Republicans about two decades behind Democrats when it comes to diversifying their ranks.

The reasons for this are many and complicated, according to interviews over the past two years with dozens of Republican women elected officials and advocates interested in seeing the ranks of female GOP leaders increase. One commonly cited reason: conservative values on family and child-rearing, which make conservative women with children still in the home more reluctant to run for office while their kids might need them, and which make GOP voters less sympathetic to their electoral bids if they do run while those kids are very young. A sense that the local Republican leadership doesn't really support them is another major factor; many pioneering GOP women, such as South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former Alaska governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, tell tales of rising in spite of the preferences of the men in their local party apparatus, and running as outsiders against GOP machines that were less than happy to see them contend for high office. GOP women also uniquely face the problem that those districts most likely to elect women (urban, diverse, kind of upscale -- like Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco one) are also those most likely to elect Democrats.

The upshot is that the gender gap at the polls is mirrored in office, and the world of elected Republican figures remains much more male than the world of elected Democrats. And that can't help but be reflected in the composition of the party's leaders.

Notable heritage breeds don't make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., thanks to the industrial turkey farming lobby's lock on the annual event.

An ancient breed of turkey hangs in a larder in this 1566 century painting by Flemish master Joachim Beuckelaer.

When I was very young I lived in a big house in a small city in a rather rural, impoverished part of Southern Mexico. The house had a substantial flower and vegetable garden and, for a while, a turkey I'd sometimes find somewhere between the patch of sunflowers and the lettuce. Most of the food we ate came from the garden and the market stalls in town and the nearby holdings of Don Gustavo, who milked his cows into a bucket and left it to us to pasteurize on our own. But one of my earliest memories is of the turkey hen who lived in the garden, and the day she flew onto the red-tiled roof of the house and wouldn't come down.

Yes, turkeys are meant to fly.

We think of turkeys as a quintessential North American bird, but like corn they were first domesticated by the indigenous inhabitants of Central and Southern Mexico and Guatemala. Early Spanish explorers brought turkeys back across the Atlantic to Europe, and when the Pilgrims set sail for the new world they brought coops worth of the domesticated Mexican fowl with them from England. It was an accident of history they landed on territory where "ther was great store of wild Turkies," as Gov. William Bradford put it in 1621. Known for a time as the "forest turkey," today we call the type of bird the Pilgrims found the Eastern Wild Turkey.

I think about the first turkey I encountered -- yes, we eventually ate her -- whenever I see the annual turkey pardon at the White House. The sad, flightless, white-feathered American birds held down by men in suits amid the trimmed hedges of the Rose Garden look nothing like the creatures I recall being sold in markets in Mexico. And they bear only a passing resemblance to turkeys in the traditional Thanksgiving illustrations that we all know so well here in the United States.

Above is your iconic North American wild turkey tom, the type of bird you and I drew in elementary school along with men and women in black, buckled shoes. Below, a turkey pardoned Wednesday by President Obama:

A Broad Breasted White from the National Turkey Federation, foreground. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters)

Unless you have gone out of your way to order and buy a heritage bird, this is the type of turkey you just ate on Thanksgiving: a Broad Breasted White. It is the only turkey breed still widely raised for the market, and it is a troubled creature. Wild turkeys have feathers colored iridescent red, green, copper, and bronze -- colors memorialized in crayon and tempera-paint images on the walls of every elementary school in America each fall. Heritage breeds like the Jersey Buff, the Narragansett, and the Bourbon Red grow feathers in an array of striking patterns and can range from tawny to black. All those shades have been bred away by the turkey industry, because feather buds (the pin feathers) are less noticeable under the skin of a plucked bird if they are white. With short legs and wide breasts -- the better to serve up white meat -- Broad Breasted White turkeys do not fly and can't even reproduce on their own.

As the New York Times described it in 2001:

After years of selective breeding, only one breed of turkey, the aptly named Broadbreasted White, remains in large-scale production in the United States. For about 30 years, it has been the breeding stock owned by the three major companies, Hybrid Turkeys of Ontario, Canada; British United Turkeys of America in Lewisburg, W. Va.; and Nicholas Turkey Breeding Farms, Sonoma, Calif. A blowzy specimen with short stubby legs, its disproportionate supply of white meat has come at the expense of taste and texture. It's stupid to boot.

The joke about turkeys drowning in the rain may actually have some basis in fact. Glenn Drowns, secretary-treasurer of the Society for the Preservation of Poultry Antiquities, and owner of the Sand Hill Preservation Center in Calamus, Iowa, a preservation farm, is infuriated by the degradation of the turkey. ''The commercial guys say they have to keep the turkeys in buildings because they'd drown in the rain,'' he said. ''It makes my blood pressure boil. Next year I'm going to raise some of them to see if they are that far gone.''

Because most Americans aren't old enough to have eaten the old-fashioned turkey, they have no idea what they are missing. The rest of us just forgot over the years, lulled into thinking that new is improved. Tasting the four heritage turkeys against two Broadbreasted Whites, one of which was free range, reminded me why the Thanksgiving turkey was so eagerly looked forward to 50 years ago, and why, today, cooks have had to dream up dozens of ways of making it taste better.

The common ancestor for all heritage breeds is the wild turkey, native to these shores. Wild turkeys went from Central America to Europe with the first explorers. Then they were imported to North America by English settlers as the black Spanish turkey, which was bred with the wild North American turkey. The Standard Bronze was the result and the other breeds followed: the Narragansett from Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island; the Bourbon from Bourbon County, Ky., and the Jersey Buff from New Jersey.

Fifty years ago, when Americans were still eating turkeys raised nearby, there were millions of those birds....

Today, their flocks number in the thousands.

The White House pardons white turkeys because that's what the National Turkey Federation sends over. A nonprofit, NTF is "the national advocate for all segments of the turkey industry"; its president was registered as a lobbyist in 2012. It began sending the White House a turkey each year before Thanksgiving during the Truman administration. Presidents ultimately chose not to eat their gift, though the "pardoning" of the bird only formally began in 1989, during the administration of George H.W. Bush. (See also "The Definitive History of the Presidential Turkey Pardon," courtesy of the White House.) Since then all the pardoned turkeys have been white, according to the photographic record.

"We just pardon who they send us," an administration official explained.

The NTF sends the White House the only breed their members raise. "The turkeys that are pardoned and the ones that are raised for consumption are almost exclusively white breasted. That is the breed that growers have found have the most white meat, which is what Americans prefer," said Kimmon Williams, a spokesperson for the National Turkey Federation.

"True wild turkeys aren't grown too much for consumption because they are a smaller bird," she added. "None of our members produce wild turkeys and I'm not entirely sure what companies do."

Heritage birds are represented by a different group, the Heritage Turkey Foundation, while wild birds find advocates at the National Wild Turkey Federation, which works with sportsmen on conservation issues. (Apparently "Turkey hunting is the hand-knit doily of the hunting genres. Arcane, involved, complex, and to outsiders, never worth the trouble," according to a recent article in Garden and Gun. Who knew.) The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy works to preserve heritage turkey breeds, as does the Society for the Preservation of Poultry Antiquities.

Some think the goofy Washington tradition of the president pardoning a turkey has passed its prime. "Of all the indignities a president must endure, officiating at the annual turkey pardon is perhaps the most unbecoming," wrote Joe Heim midweek in the Washington Post, calling the practice "unforgivably silly" and something "no president should intentionally subject himself -- or the country -- to."

But like so many other practices Washington interest groups have managed to get the government to sign on to, it seems unlikely the president will be able to get rid of the turkey receiving and pardoning ceremony without a minor uproar. Besides, people love silly White House traditions precisely because they are so incongruous, providing light-hearted photos of the most powerful man in the world.

Given the Obamas' concern with food sourcing and healthy eating, though, it might be time to diversify the turkey-pardon pool. Some of those heritage breeds are gorgeous birds, and the cause of preserving them is certainly as worthwhile as the annual event with Big Turkey's trade association. Heck, it might even make for a better photo. At the very least, it would turn an annual bit of White House silliness in an opportunity to raise awareness about a tiny sliver of American agricultural heritage, and provoke thinking about its future.

A flock of heritage turkey breeds. (Porterturkeys.com)

Just because he speaks feelingly about immigrants and the poor doesn't mean the Florida senator is going step away from the conservative war on science.

Philippe Wojazer/Reuters

Is Marco Rubio ready to be a leader of the GOP? His remarks on the humanity of undocumented immigrants and the poor show him to be much more in tune with his generation than was losing vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan. Only a year Rubio's senior, Ryan put forward a Randian vision of a nation that does little to lift up the economy's losers -- or newcomers -- while Rubio has become a powerful advocate for an as yet unnamed strain of forward-looking conservatism. When it comes to the lives of Latino voters, the Republican Party may have no more articulate and reality-based spokesman than Rubio.

That's one reason it was so disappointing to hear his remarks in an interview with Michael Hainey, the deputy editor of GQ, in the December issue of the magazine. As Hainey sets the scene, Rubio knew he would be speaking for the long-haul. Writes Hainey:

I met up with Rubio in the back room of a local community center in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood. He had just come from the GQ photo shoot and was still sweating from the early-morning heat. Rubio smiles a lot and likes to put people at ease. But he also speaks with the restraint of a guy who knows everything he says will be parsed and, most likely, used against him. "I've learned the hard way," he says. "You have to always be thinking how your actions today will be viewed at a later date."

Hainey asked Rubio, a U.S. senator who sits on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, a very basic question that has somehow become a trick question in conservative circles.

"How old do you think the Earth is?" he asked.

Rubio's reply:

I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.

There are an astonishingly large number of things wrong in this statement -- some which mark Rubio's greenness on the national stage, and some that merely show the extent to which biblically-literal conservatism continues to hold sway over the GOP during the most broadly culturally liberal era, ever.

To begin with, Rubio's remarks are not even an accurate description of what's laid out in the Bible. It was not a seven-day process to make the Earth, according to the King James Bible's Genesis. The Earth itself was made on the first day, though it took until the third day for the waters to be gathered together and dry land to emerge. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" is first thing that Genesis describes, even if "the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep," and it was not until the third day that "God called the dry land Earth."

Secondly, scientists estimate the age of the Earth from geological research on rocks from this planet, the moon, and from meteorites -- not from "recorded history." Recorded history only takes us back to the Sumerians in the 4th millennium B.C., though the history of art takes us back another 34,000 years or so after that. So the dispute is not between the historical record and theological interpretations -- history and theology were actually quite intertwined at the start of writing. The dispute is between science and an anti-modern strain of Christian theology rejected by leaders of a number of the major Christian denominations, including Pope Benedict XVI, who has said, "there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such."

Rubio is not actually wrong that there have been other scientific theories about the creation of the universe beyond the Big Bang theory, and that there are some questions that are not fully explained by current models. But there is no way to reject the Big Bang model without also rejecting a century's worth of physics research -- research which sometimes underpins the technologically sophisticated world in which we now live. And while there is necessarily always a certain humility involved in an endeavor like estimating the age of the universe, it is now calculated to be 13.7 billion years old, with an uncertainty of only 1 percent.

One doesn't expect political leaders to necessarily know things like this -- or that the Earth is estimated to be 4.54 billion years old -- off the tops of their heads. But it's not unreasonable to expect enough of an allegiance to reality to be able to acknowledge that the science is based on solid ground and should be treated as such by our public education systems. And one expects a certain agility on the topic from anyone who hopes to be more than a marginal GOP figure.

Matt Lewis points to the way John McCain finessed the question of his belief in evolution during a 2008 debate as a model for how Republicans can acknowledge both religion and modernity. "I believe in evolution," McCain said. "But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also."

The vastness and magnificence of nature and the world in which we live gives rise to similar sentiments in many religions. But just because the dawn is beautiful does not mean than we reject efforts to understand what we see in the darkness beyond our world, or lack the capacity to discover its origins.

"I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that," Rubio told GQ. But if he wants to oversee the world's premiere space program, the high-tech U.S. military, the education of America's youth, and policies to address our climate changing climate, he is going to need to be.