The Tea Party’s brand of patented loose cannon obstructionism is too threatening to a GOP still reeling from the election flop. The ouster of the Tea Party hardliners and desertions by GOP bigwigs from the movement was hardly the first rumbling that the lights are dimming for the Tea Party. A year earlier, polls showed that far more Americans had an unfavorable view of the Tea Party than when it roared on the scene a couple of years earlier. The disaffection cut across all lines and that included many conservatives. 

As the vice presidential debate’s referee, Martha Raddatz of ABC News is getting high marks almost all around for regaining a modicum of respect for the media, following Jim Lehrer’s limpid performance in the first presidential debate. What’s being widely missed by the ringside scorekeepers, however, is that while Raddatz is getting a pass for dwelling too much on foreign policy — after all, her colleagues allow, she is a foreign correspondent -- she badly flubbed the portion of the debate devoted to entitlement programs.

In an apparent off-the-cuff remark, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan gushed that he thought it was a “cool thing” that an African-American was president. But Ryan’s rapture with President Obama didn’t last past the first sentence. In the next breath he quickly added that he didn’t like much else about Obama. The much else was how much Obama has spent on health, education and job development programs that would help the poor and minorities. That spending has been fiscal heresy for Ryan.

Talk of the end of American exceptionalism seems to be everywhere lately, but in at least one area, the United States inarguably reigns supreme.  Currently, per capita health care expenditures in the U.S. are approaching $8,000 a year, far more than anywhere else in the world.  The nation with the second-highest per capita cost, Norway, spends  $2,500 less per person per year.  What do Americans get for their money?  A life expectancy of 78.2 years, slightly ahead of Panama and Libya.

The merry month of March might well have marked the beginning of the end of political lunacy in the United States, replaced by a refreshing maturity among the electorate——never mind the various fevered fanatics currently holding public office, or hoping to. Signs are numerous that zealotry has had its day in the sun, and that radical pragmatism, if you will, shall be the Zeitgeist come November.

From New America Media and the Investigative Reporting Workshop: Some call this moment the Great Recession. As the hardship has lingered, others have begun calling it the Little Depression. But equating the hard times of the 1930s with the hard times of today is mostly overblown rhetoric. Or is it?