The Colonel's Forum

It's like the young and the restless, except for Congress. What we've seen this week is a preview of coming attractions from a GOP majority in Congress. Rather than addressing a very real issue facing this country (immigration, including a refugee crisis), they've done nothing but posturing, pontificating, and basically being a bunch of windbags. We're a nation of immigrants. When the Europeans arrived, they treated the ACTUAL locals like shit, giving them lovely new diseases, killing them by the thousands, and ultimately "relocating" them to "reservations." Every group that arrived here has very quickly taken the position that, wherever the next wave of immigrants is coming from, "THOSE people are going to ruin the place so we have to keep them out!" The English and Germans fought to keep out the Irish and Italians. Today it's the Mexicans we have to keep out. "Build a wall!" At various points in our history we've trea...

Today I got to "go to work" in my old hometown of Chicago. I only lived here for a couple years, but it's a city that gets in your blood. I'm not sure if that's because of the freezing wind off the lakefront that seems to blow through your veins, or from the unique grease content within a Chicago hot dog (or perhaps a Portillo's Italian beef sandwich) that clogs up your veins. Either way, if you live here for any length of time, it becomes part of you. Walking to work in the Loop, you can't help but notice a sense of productivity and commerce that seems almost tangible among the locals. Chicago has always been known as the city that works, the city with broad shoulders, and I think that's a sentiment that spans the economic classes here. Take a stroll down California street in San Francisco's financial district, and you'll see plenty of bankers and barons of industry going about their day, don't get me wrong. San Francisco just has a com...

Now that McConnell will be serving 36 years in the Senate, and the coming 6 as majority leader, I think it's reasonable to expect that he delivers the goods for Kentucky. I mean, a Senators #1 job is to serve his state, right? Can we at least agree on that? Don't get me wrong, I don't think there's any chance Mitch will actually do that. He will serve himself first, the GOP 2nd (gotta stack the deck for your party in the next election, right?), and the Commonwealth will be a distant 3rd if it's on his list at all. I was wrong once though, and it could feasibly happen again. How will we know? I propose defining a list of metrics to measure McConnell's next 6 years. Since his party controls Congress for at least the next two years, we can expect great things right? My GOP loyalist friends are already making excuses of course for why Boehner and McConnell will fail to accomplish anything; that Reid will be obstructionist and Obama will veto everything. To this...

Some people would have you believe that there is a simple answer to this: Obama sucks. While I disagree (I'm still rating him "average"), I'm also smart enough to know that sucks is a subjective term. Some people believe he sucks, and will continue to do so. The people who think he sucks weren't going to vote for Democrats anyway, and Obama wasn't on the ballot. This was a big victory for the GOP any way you slice it; even bigger than the RNC expected. Hell, it was even bigger than Nate Silver , my favorite data scientist, expected. So, objectively, what happened? My summary is as follows: 1) The party of the sitting president loses mid terms, that's just a fact . The average loss is 25 House seats and 3 Senate seats (since FDR). Those numbers jump to 30 and 6, respectively, when the sitting president is a lame duck. As of the time I'm writing this, the Dems lost 7 Senate seats, and 12 House seats, so, technically, their losses were favorable (LESS ...