Reading List: December 8, 2016

Happy Thursday.

There was a silly proposal to put Ohio Governor John Kasich forward as a compromise to the electoral college recently (Kasich has said he’s uninterested in serving). The idea, promoted by liberals, was that Kasich would be “different” or “better” than Trump. Well…. Ohio just basically banned abortion. Kasich has approved every other piece of restrictive abortion legislation that has passed his desk, so this should be a shoo-in.

A bill that would make Ohio’s abortion laws the strictest in the nation is on its way to Gov. John Kasich’s desk just hours after Republicans slipped the “heartbeat bill” into a child welfare bill.

Remember Ted Cruz? He wants you to think of him eating queso and dripping it all over his face, says The Concourse writer Ashley Feinberg.

Earlier today, during a casual run-in with reporters, Ted Cruz apparently decided that we have yet to be sufficiently punished for our collective misdeeds. To rectify the situation, Ted Cruz talked about how much he enjoys dribbling queso down his flesh-mask’s mottled chin.

We are truly living in hell.

More than just being viscerally upsetting, Ted’s ode to the soup-adjacent cheese is just slightly off, in the way that only Ted, a real human man with real human skin, can pull off.

Speaking of also-rans, Bernie Sanders showed some of his trademark principled, independent courage last week by voting in lockstep with the entire Senate to continue the crippling, pointless, lethal sanctions regime against Iran. In fact, the main point of the sanctions is to strengthen the radical, hostile elements of Iranian domestic politics. From CounterPunch:

The U.S. government has repeatedly followed policies that embolden and strengthen the factions in the Iranian government that thrive on open hostility toward American and its European allies. A majority of experts of Iranian affairs have warned year after year that the imposition of a regime of sanctions against the Iranian government would result in the further suppression of civil liberties in Iran, the deepening of economic hardship on the populace, and the creation of a informal crony economy controlled by those the sanctions intend to target. Although there is convincing evidence that the sanctions indeed work against their stated objectives, the U.S. continues to pursue the same policies. Are the Americans slow learners, or the pursuit of peace and stability is not in reality the aim of these policies?

And finally, I appeared on District Sentinel Radio to talk about Al Giordano and Tulsi Gabbard. I start at minute 19, but you should listen to the whole show.