It’s mostly intact but an amendment that it should recognize same-sex couples for the purposes of immigration has been thrown under the bus, a move that I am TOTALLY OKAY with as long as SCOTUS gets its shit together in June.

The EU raised sanctions on Syrian oil in an effort to fund the moderate rebels, but instead Jabhat al-Nusra, the local al Qaeda affiliate, gained control of the oil fields and is refining oil in open trenches, polluting the environment and funding itself while the Syrian government — with whom they are nominally at war — pays them via a middleman so that the government can retain its own funding. Meanwhile, fighting between rebels and the government has mostly stopped so the rebels can fight with each other over control of oil fields. Clusterfuck does not begin to describe this situation.

Namely, that even if their party leadership is earnestly inclusive (and that’s more believably true of the Conservatives than the GOP), the rank-and-file and the lower-tier elected representatives are often very, VERY racist, and that’s a problem if you expect people to vote for you. I don’t understand how the Conservatives are in power.

Merit-based visas, higher caps on existing skilled-worker visas, and, at long last, a way for low-skilled workers to legally work in the country: the new “W” visa would last for three years and be renewable (the existing H-2B visa technically allows this but is a nightmare).

Abortion isn’t murder, but Dr. Gosnell delivered and killed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of live babies — many far, far older than the six months which is the legal limit for abortions. If we want to encourage the acceptance of safe, responsible abortion clinics, we have to come down like a ton of bricks on abuses like these. This article is very, very hard to read.

For the record, those four are all from deeply conservative states: Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. Johnson might be considered an outlier, but he is retiring.

A single datapoint, to be sure, but an interesting one.

Doubtless there is some bias here, but it sounds like Portman really threw his vice-Presidential ambitions under the bus in favor of his son, which really is admirable.

If they could trust you idiots to shut up about it, then they wouldn’t need to take agents with them.

The shortlist: stop hating immigrants, start listening to minorities, stop hating gays, stop blocking out opposing viewpoints, stop being all about rich people. As @eparillon put it, “stop being Republicans”.