McConnell once said admirably of Henry Clay, "The compromises that he brought about probably pushed the Civil War off, first the one in 1820, then the one in 1850." This is the definition of short-term thinking. Today, we don't remember the Civil War being "pushed off" - we remember that, as Abraham Lincoln said, the war came. For his part, Obama will be remembered as a two-term president who won reelection in an ailing economy and who passed a law providing access to health care for all Americans. McConnell's claim to the historical legacy he once yearned for might lie, ironically, in having made Obama's possible.

Put it this way: if the Civil War had been fought in 1820, not only would the Union have failed to abolish slavery in the south, but it's doubtful we'd have a Union today. Those morally reprehensible compromises bought the time for the north to industrialize and gain the wealth required to win a long civil war. For that, I thank Sen. Clay, even as we should simultaneously condemn every action that allowed the perpetuation of chattel slavery.

Those terrible compromises did their job, even if they received much deserved derision at the time and in historical accounts. Thus, in the process of laughing at what he deems McConnell's short term thinking, Chotiner reveals some poorly thought out historical thinking of his own.

This Peter Worthington column appeared in the Huffington Post on July 25, 2012.

From my CNN column: why those rushing to bash the Heritage Foundation study keep forgetting that math is math:

This Peter Worthington column was first published in the Toronto Sun on June 11, 2011.

Renowned author Dan Brown smiled, the ends of his mouth curving upwards in a physical expression of pleasure. He felt much better. If your books brought innocent delight to millions of readers, what did it matter whether you knew the difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb?

“Thanks, John,” he thanked. Then he put down the telephone and perambulated on foot to the desk behind which he habitually sat on a chair to write his famous books on an Apple iMac MD093B/A computer. New book Inferno, the latest in his celebrated series about fictional Harvard professor Robert Langdon, was inspired by top Italian poet Dante. It wouldn’t be the last in the lucrative sequence, either. He had all the sequels mapped out. The Mozart Acrostic. The Michelangelo Wordsearch. The Newton Sudoku.

The 190lb adult male human being nodded his head to indicate satisfaction and returned to his bedroom by walking there. Still asleep in the luxurious four-poster bed of the expensive $10 million house was beautiful wife Mrs Brown. Renowned author Dan Brown gazed admiringly at the pulchritudinous brunette’s blonde tresses, flowing from her head like a stream but made from hair instead of water and without any fish in. She was as majestic as the finest sculpture by Caravaggio or the most coveted portrait by Rodin. I like the attractive woman, thought the successful man.

Even though an American Civil Liberties Union official described their excessive interest in right-wing groups as “about as constitutionally troubling as it gets,” the bureaucrats in question probably thought they were just doing their patriotic duty, and giving dangerous extremists the treatment they deserved.

Where might an enterprising, public-spirited I.R.S. agent get the idea that a Tea Party group deserved more scrutiny from the government than the typical band of activists seeking tax-exempt status? Oh, I don’t know: why, maybe from all the prominent voices who spent the first two years of the Obama era worrying that the Tea Party wasn’t just a typically messy expression of citizen activism, but something much darker — an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.

From my National Post column: when anti-social behavior masquerades as "free speech".

It would be rash to conclude that immigration's impact on low-wage workers in the United States is a problem in the process of solving itself. It would also be rash to conclude that immigration is poised to do to more skilled workers what it has already done to high school dropouts. For the moment, all we can conclude with certainty is that although immigration has helped create income inequality during the past three decades, it isn't the star of the show. "If you were to list the five or six main things" that caused the Great Divergence, [Harvard professor George] Borjas told me, "what I would say is [that immigration is] a contributor. Is it the most important contributor? No."

(pp 73-74)

Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic last year, and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna Loa. But the average reading for an entire day surpassed that level at Mauna Loa for the first time in the 24 hours that ended at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, according to data from both NOAA and Scripps. ... “It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen E. Raymo, a Columbia University earth scientist.

From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight band, from about 180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages, to about 280 during the warm periods between. The evidence shows that global temperatures and CO2 levels are tightly linked.

For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future.

The injection of theology into the Israeli-Palestinian real estate dispute has rarely proved helpful, particularly in cases where one side seeks to make a claim to all the land at the expense of the other.

The Church of Scotland’s laughably regressive new document, “The Inheritance of Abraham?: A Report on the ‘Promised Land,” which wilfully mischaracterises and then dismisses Jewish claims to a state in Palestine, is equally as unwelcome.

And Emily Hauser writes at the Daily Beast's Open Zion blog:

The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Organizations were singled out because they included the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

An apparently less than brilliant Egyptian man stabbed one of the few Americans who might have been sympathetic to his cause: