God spends $390 million lobbying Washington every year.

Jonathan Jones writes at The Guardian about the now-iconic photo of 84 year old Occupy activist Dorli Rainey after being pepper sprayed in Seattle:

America is a religious nation and I can’t help thinking that either the people in the picture, or the photographer, consciously or unconsciously reached for an image from the iconography of Catholic faith. No movement, in its early history, recognised the power of martyrdom more thoroughly than Christianity did. Obviously, martyrdom is a Christian concept. To die for the faith, by being pinioned to the ground and beheaded – say – or crucified upside down, was to imitate Christ, to reenact the suffering of a God made flesh.

David Sessions at The Daily Beast on “Why Evangelicals Forgive (Republican) Sex Scandals,” namely those recently lobbed at GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain by five women:

It’s hard to overstate the religious right’s media persecution complex: they hold the entertainment media responsible for introducing sexual permissiveness, the social acceptance of gay marriage, and what they see as general cultural indecency; they believe the political media systematically portrays conservatives and believers as provincial idiots. They instantly identifiy with others they believe are under similar attack, sometimes to the point that no amount of evidence will convince them the media is following a legitimate story. Thus Cain is automatically innocent, and there must be something good about Gingrich if the media dislike him enough to bring up his divorces.

It is this simple:  The Supercommittee failed because the Republican members refused to consider taxing the richest Americans at a rate similar or closer to what the rest of us pay.  In other words, victory went to the uncompromising Republicans who think that those who have vast amounts of wealth–presumably because they deserve it and/or have earned it honestly, with or without the benefits of social or hereditary advantage–should be protected from an egalitarian tax structure.  On the street these uncompromising Republicans are more familiarly known as the 1%.

Obama is the only president in 82 years to use the term “American exceptionalism.”