Happy New Year

++ Happy New Year to all of you. May it be healthy,prosperous and a productive one and may it be very constructive. I'm just hoping for one for me without the surprises of 2013--just dull and steady.

++Congratulations to Andrew Sullivan at The Dish. He took a gamble on establishing a website sustained by subscriptions. He aimed at $900,000. Tonight he reports a surge putting him at over $850,000 with no debt. If you haven't subscribed, please do so. He has created a site that not only provides culture, religion but also politics. He should be singled out for his addition of poetry, which is absent almost everywhere else. Just the videos of Seamus Heaney reading are worth the price of subscription. Or you might enjoy a dialogue between him and Dan Savage where Andrew can't get in a word without Dan going off on a monologue.

++Let's also applaud Brainwrap, the maker of Obamasignups.net for his prediction a few weeks ago that by tonight 2.1 million Americans would have signed up for health insurance. Indeed,they did. Brainwrap has the unusual characteristic of issuing corrections on minute statistics from small states which he got wrong the first time around.

++In case you have been living abroad or in a cave,PEW put out a poll, which Dana Millbank wrote about in tonight's Amazon Post. The Republican Party is becoming more, not less theological,even less scientific,older,whiter, and more conservative. A plurality of Republicans do not believe in evolution,let alone climate change.

++I heard that Mitch McConnell is plotting to get even with Harry Reid for ending the filibuster. McConnell is gearing up to stop the extension of unemployment insurance and the hike of the minimum wage. Maybe the GOP has managed to figure out how to spin this. But it seems to me this is beyond petty, it is cruel and may rebound in the 2014 elections.