Jonathan Cohn points out the GOPer advantage whenever they have to come up with an alternative health care plan:

...[T]he vast majority of Republican officials have zero interest in health care reforms that significantly increase access to care.

Banner ad paid for by 'Citizens for Rauner, Inc' [Inc?] -- trashing Kirk Dillard.

Words that will live in infamy:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) argued forcefully Sunday that the government shutdown late last year was not the Republican Party's fault, but was in fact the Democrats' doing -- a contention that even members of Cruz's own party disagree with.

"I think it was a mistake that President Obama and the Democrats shut the government down this fall," Cruz said on CBS's "Face the Nation," according to a transcript. "The reason they did so is that President Obama dug in and said he wouldn't compromise and he wouldn't negotiate."

Cruz said it was actually President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) who threatened and caused the shutdown.

"I didn't threaten to shut down the government the last time," Cruz said. "I don't think we should ever shut down the government."

More here...

It's a verifiable 'War on Thanksgiving'.

Is the conservative media for whom family values mean so much, picking up on this?

Can't wait to see how this plays out:

"To our Democratic friends, you own Obamacare and it's going to be the political gift that keeps on giving," [Sen. Lindsey Graham] said. "So the shutdown will be old news next year; Obamacare's faults will be front and center in 2014, if we don't screw this up." [transcript]

h/t newseum

Congressman Keith Ellison gave the keynote.

Reading of the Day:

"It seems to me a strange doctrine that the most serious and responsible of all human acts imposes no obligation on those who do it, of showing that they have a real grievance; that those who rebel for the power of oppressing others, exercise as sacred a right as those who do the same thing to resist oppression practised upon themselves." John Stuart Mill, 'The Contest in America' (1862)

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Excellent piece by Andrew Cohen over at The Atlantic of putting the Zimmerman case into perspective:

What the verdict says, to the astonishment of tens of millions of us, is that you can go looking for trouble in Florida, with a gun and a great deal of racial bias, and you can find that trouble, and you can act upon that trouble in a way that leaves a young man dead, and none of it guarantees that you will be convicted of a crime. But this curious result says as much about Florida's judicial and legislative sensibilities as it does about Zimmerman's conduct that night. This verdict would not have occurred in every state.... Don't like it? Lobby to change Florida's laws.

The crime here is 'Concealed Carry' and 'Stand Your Ground'. With laws like those, none of us are safe -- we are all Travyon Martin.