If deep within you you feel the stirrings of compassion for these two, I can somewhat understand your feeling.  It's hard to see pure evil in any human being, or to comprehend how a human being can perpetrate the acts of a monster.  Any self-reflective soul might pause to consider this.

I don't understand why you would take any action based on that feeling, including writing about it.  I believe that respect for the victims, which includes to some extent all of us, requires publicly simply going about the business of justice.  Soul-searching can be left a private matter.

Have Republicans conceded that, or have they acquiesced in tax increases because they were already written into law and they lacked the political numbers to change that?  Going forward, will they grudgingly accept some tax increases as the price of arriving at some deal on entitlements and spending cuts, or will they simply accept them because, after all, they concede that they're not really all that bad for the economy?

 You'd know better than I which of these interpretations is most applicable of our representatives in congress, and I wouldn't presume to argue with you.  But I'm quite sure the denizens of Ricochet, many of whom are Republicans, have made no such concession. 

That's well put.   And one of the interesting things about the show's popularity is that those aristocratic values speak powerfully to contemporary viewers, including liberal viewers, who no doubt make up a good part of the audience, this being PBS and all.  

I think an awful lot of us feel consciously or not a deep sense of loss, of lack of meaning, stemming from the debasement of those values in our culture, even though we may be such creatures of our times as not to be capable of wholeheartedly believing in them.

Election to the Hall of Fame is an honor, not an entitlement.  No to Bonds, Clemons, and Rose.

Patrick Leahy.

Harry Reid is also a good choice.

The trouble with Carlson's piece is that he thinks raising taxes is a viable solution to our long-term problems.  He accepts CBO scoring for the over-the-cliff scenario, where we get all the revenue that the new tax rates imply, without counting at all the negative effects on growth and the tax avoidance that a tax rate increase causes.  I'd feel all right about the spending side of the no-deal strategy, but the tax increases are just a loser, short-term and long-term.

The first time I ever heard the song Wish You Were Here was when a friend of mine played it for me on acoustic guitar right after the record came out.  Don't wince; the guy had a great voice and he played the crap out of it.  Anyway, having been introduced to it in that spare setting, without all the production and studio atmosphere, I've always been able to think of it just as a song rather than as a track on an album, and it is a great one.

I'd go with Time as next best.  I'm gratified to see so many here share that predilection.

I'm not saying Rubio's opposition was symbolic; I think he believes in his position.  I sympathize with his position, but I think the reality of it is that we are better off going with the compromise deal.   Obviously I don't view Ryan's position as unprincipled, since I share it.

The only one who's being unprincipled here is me.  I'm glad Rubio didn't get his way this time, but I still think he's our great hope, and I will support him for higher office next chance I get.

Each of them has taken the correct position.  They are two entirely different creatures.

Rubio is a fabulous candidate, with real charisma and leadership ability.  He is staking out a principled stance that will do him well in future presidential primaries, and very possibly future presidential general elections as well.

Ryan, I think we all found out this past year, is not a fabulous candidate.  He is a legislator at heart, and he's a good one.  His stance was to my mind the right one in terms of policy.  It was best for the country to NOT raise income tax rates on everybody, and to limit the damage done by previous  bad decisions (temporary tax law).

I have turned to the dark side since this past election.  I now am cynical enough to support a man (Rubio) who has taken a position I hoped would lose.  I am not happy but accepting of the outcome of our dance on the edge of the Fiscal Cliff.

I may be the only person in the world who thinks Grover Norquist was not just twisting himself into a pretzel when he supported plan B as "not breaking the pledge".  The tax rates we've been paying for the last 10 years are expired, according to current law.  Any bill passed now that keeps any of them for anybody is a tax cut.  That's not sophistry: the sophistry was in making these tax cuts temporary in the first place.

The Mercatus paper you link to is very succinct and persuasive, and very timely.  I'm interested to hear what other members make of it.

If we accept that the Bush tax-cuts were bad because they had an expiration date and because they were not offset by spending cuts, then what would we suggest as the best policy to pursue right now?  It seems the prescription would be to simply allow them to expire, and allow the sequester to kick in; that would resolve both those difficulties.

I have a hard time accepting this medicine, which is probably the explanation for our current mess.  I got some re-thinking to do.

No.

The Barro comment seems bizarre to me. He can't be saying that Obamacare, easy money, and stimulus spending are the sort of things Republicans should be offering.   I would agree that we need to connect with middle-class kitchen-table concerns, but our problem is not that Republicans have been pushing some extreme austerity platform, it's that we weren't able to draw the line from the pro-growth policies we were advancing to the benefits they would bring to the middle-class.  Admittedly it's a tougher sell than the standard Democrat give-away package, but tough or not, that's the case we need to make.

Murphy is partly right.  The immigration business I think is completely wrong, but I buy the idea that social issues do work against us with younger voters.   It's a hard problem to solve, given the tensions we always have to deal with between social conservatives and the more libertarian members of our coalition.

Is that why people stayed home?  Maybe so, but having just had it forcibly demonstrated to me that I don't grok the American electorate any longer, I would like to see some research done on this point rather than assume I know the motivations of our stray voters.

I think you're correct that the media problem is the single most important thing we conservatives  need to change.  It's not true that no one on the Right  is talking about it... you are, after all.  Keep beating that drum by all means.

I also don't think it's over, but we're losing badly.  Still, there's been progress over the last couple of decades: Fox News is important, and talk radio is important.  But we need much more.

The first thing that comes to my mind is that we require a couple of dozen new  Breitbarts.  A small squad of conservative Jolly Rogers.  Everybody loves a pirate, after all.  Pointed ridicule aimed at specific concrete targets, of which there are many on the left.  Make fun of them, and make it fun.  We lost so much when we lost that man... but surely there are more among us who can carry on that tradition.

 I don't share your automatic disdain for anyone who didn't vote, but I am interested in finding out specifically why the 2 million or so McCain voters who didn't come out for Romney didn't come out.

That seems like a really good starting point for a post-mortem of this election.