The January, 1998 Ice Storm took people by surprise, an unremarkable weather front that turned lethal when it stalled over the border country of northern New York and southeastern Canada, dropping freezing rain for an unprecedented five days.

Spotty power losses began Tuesday, January 6 in the North Country. Power was out for 1,000 electric customers in Massena. Service was restored but lost again on Wednesday as the freezing rain continued. Damage from icing on tree limbs and utility wires was widespread. Despite colder temperatures overnight Wednesday the 7th, the rain kept falling. And freezing. Utility crews began to lose the battle:"

Partisans in judicial nomination fights like to play the victim. As each side tells it, obstruction of judicial nominees is all the other side’s fault. Each act of contemporary obstruction is justified by some act of obstruction that came before. The reality, however, is that there are no clean hands in these fights any more. For over twenty-five years the two parties have been engaged in an escalating game of tit-for-tat. Each time the tables are turned, the opposition party retaliates in kind, and then some. Given the reactions to my post yesterday on judicial nominations, I thought it would be worth recounting the history (as I have before) — with the relevant data — and then to explain what it means. I’ll follow this up with a post on what I think should be done, in light of this history, to end the obstruction of judicial nominees.

In the context of appellate nominations, Senate Democrats decided to begin opposing some of President Reagan’s nominees in 1986. Although they did not frame their opposition in ideological terms, this initial effort was clearly motivated by a desire to prevent the Reagan Administration from stocking the courts with judicial nominees who shared the administration’s conservative judicial philosophy. This initial effort yielded a few victories — a few nominees were defeated (including Jeff Sessions, who now sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee) — but 88 percent of Reagan’s appellate nominees were confirmed. Efforts to block conservative judicial nominees by delaying confirmation increased during the latter half of George H. W. Bush’s Administration and, as a consequence, only 79 percent of his appellate nominees were confirmed. (Data on confirmation rates are taken from this Brookings Institution report by Russell Wheeler.)

President Clinton’s nominees had relatively smooth sailing during his first two years, when Senate Democrats held the majority, but his administration was relatively slow to make nominations. As data available from the Federal Judicial Center shows, at the end of his first year in office, President Clinton had named nominees for fewer than twenty percent of judicial vacancies. For the twenty appellate vacancies in November 1993, Clinton had only named two nominees. The Clinton Administration’s failure to move on judicial nominations became a problem when Republicans took the Senate in 1994. With fewer nominees in the confirmation pipeline, it was relatively easy for Republicans to keep Clinton’s confirmation numbers down. All they had to do was slow down the process — and they did.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - The state social services department is going to strip food stamp benefits from people who are found to have deliberately overspent their balance when the electronic food stamp service was down last month.

The Department of Children and Family Services announced Wednesday that it would seek to disqualify food stamp recipients through the state's administrative hearing process.

Several Louisiana retailers, including Wal-Mart stores in Mansfield and Springhill, allowed food stamp recipients to make unlimited purchases on Oct. 12, when the electronic card system was down and balances couldn't be checked.

DCFS says about 12,000 insufficient funds were conducted when the system was down, though not all are assumed to be fraudulent.

The department's response comes after U.S. Sen. David Vitter complained that state officials weren't aggressively pursuing food stamp fraud.

After finding out that statistician Nate Silver hadn't actually visited Alabama or Mississippi before he projected they would be the last states to approve gay marriage, "The Daily Show" sent Al Madrigal down south to see if he was right.

Using hidden cameras to follow two stunt men posing as a gay couple, Madrigal was able to capture surprisingly positive reactions from the locals in Mississippi, the last state to ratify the 13th amendment to end slavery, and Alabama, the state that "still has segregated sororities."

As it turned out, not only was there a lack of homophobic backlash to the couple, but a lot of folks celebrated their love (and even an engagement in a waffle house) right along with them. Your move, Silver!