Last week U.S. Senator Ron Johnson went on CNN's Crossfire to once again pound the war drum.

When U.S. Representative Karen Bass said, "there is real pushback, constituents in my district, the last thing in the world they want to hear is us getting into another conflict," Johnson interjected that the war fatigue Americans feel isn't because we've been at war longer than at any other time in our history, but because President Obama has done a realllllly crappy job selling them to the American people:

Seeing Famous Places From Above Is Surreal.

Niagara Falls


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Mexico City


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Tulip Fields, The Netherlands


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Bac Son Valley, Vietnam

Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity has $125 million budget for 2014, but it's fair because every citizen is free to put up $125 million.

Sign of progress, it seemed absolutely irrelevant today that Michael Sam’s boyfriend is white.

Conservative economic pundits just love to justify "business-friendly" policies to state governments as keys to job growth, which after all is the whole ballgame in economic policy-making. As Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin has now shown, the problem is that pro-business policies don't really contribute to economic growth. They just make the rich richer, which is not the same thing at all.

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But does a high ALEC ranking translate into high growth? That's the question Chinn asked. He started by measuring private nonfarm job growth in four states--California, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Minnesota--dating to January 2011, when all four got new governors. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Sam Brownback of Kansas were extremely ALEC-friendly, Jerry Brown of California and Mark Dayton of Minnesota were not.

Here's what he found, in a nutshell: "Kansas and Wisconsin, ranked 15th and 17th in terms of the ALEC-Laffer Economic Outlook Rankings, are doing equally badly relative to US employment growth. In contrast, Minnesota (ranked 46th) is outperforming the United States and those two states...What about California? It is ranked 47th by ALEC-Laffer, and yet is doing the best in terms of employment amongst the four states." Chinn's graph of the four states' job growth accompanies this post.

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Indeed, when Chinn mapped the ALEC rankings for all 50 states against their economic growth, he found that, if anything, a higher index score correlates with a worse economic performance. That won't come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the ALEC follies over time: The Iowa Policy Project found the same negative correlation in 2012.

Florida woman hires bulldozer to demolish neighbor’s home, authorities say

A Florida woman disliked her neighbors so much that she got a bulldozer to demolish their home, authorities said.
Ana Maria Moreta Folch, 62, somehow got a key to the mobile home next door and convinced a heavy equipment company that it was her property, according to Cmd. Chuck Mulligan of the St. Johns County Sheriff's Office.

Then she allegedly asked the operator of the bulldozer to raze the home in St. Augustine — but it's unclear how she ever thought she'd get away with it.

"It's difficult to say what goes through people's minds sometimes when they concoct these schemes," Mulligan told the Daily News.