Senator Lautenberg died this week. The last lion of the Senate, Senator Lautenberg was the remaining member to have served in World War II.

A successful businessman and war hero, he also had the humility to legislate from his own personal weaknesses and mistakes. A former smoker, he pushed to end smoking on planes and in federal buildings.

While his push to pass a federal helmet law was long resisted as nanny-state legislation gone wrong, his determination to reduce motorcycle deaths was admirable.

Republicans who keep saying that the GOP isn’t racist should ask themselves, why is it that racists today are almost always Republican?

When South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley announced her statewide steering committee, it was noted that Cuban-American member, Roan Garcia-Quintana, had ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens. (Garcia-Quintana was asked to resign by Haley after some of his comments surfaced, Haley said there was no room for "racially divisive rhetoric).  

For a president who is supposedly antagonistic to the Tea Party, he sure buckles quickly at the first signs of protest.  President Obama has spent the last six years enacting Republican policies, from “Romneycare” to the “war on terror” to his mass deportation of immigrants, with little to show for it but a continued unwillingness to cooperate by the Right.

The perception that the IRS targeted conservative groups is certainly cause for concern, but liberal folks like Jon Stewart and Chris Matthews should stop hyperventilating on the perception of political targeting and look more closely on what this extra scrutiny actually looked like.

Placed in its proper historical context, far more egregious government infiltration has been going on in the minority community for years without much concern from the media, much less the GOP.

One of the more curious observations of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on immigration this week was the dynamic and broad support for immigration reform by the religious communities, business advocates and civil rights groups.

And perhaps just as curious has been the staleness and unoriginality of the anti-immigrant panelists, Kris Kobach, Mark Krikorian and Steve Camarota.

This dog and pony show by the fringe right has come with the usual bag of tricks. 

Hugo Chavez is dead, but his oil lives. A man who evoked a prism of emotions, from those looking down on Latin America with scorn for his anti-American rhetoric to those who yearned that his democratic message may infect our complacent masses, Chavez was a divisive symbol of our changing relationship with our continental neighbors.

An oil tycoon American leftists could love, a member of the one percent now at rest with over…