Our son, the reporter

On a recent visit to DC, Benjy Sarlin, crack reporter for Talking Points Memo, shlepped his proud parents around a steamy Capitol.

Along the way we nearly bowled over the Attorney General, got to hear a lonely Senator Durbin address a nearly empty Senate chamber, and visited the Senate press room, where Benjy's desk was squeezed between NPR and Al Jazeera. Here's a shot of the press room:

We also got to ride on the "subway" between the Capitol and the Senate office building. Not such a big deal for New Yorkers.

Nothing ever really changes

I've been reading Jon Meacham's terrific biography of Andrew Jackson and came upon a speech that seems precisely relevant to the current state of political discourse. It was made by Edward Livingston of New York, during a particularly vitriolic period of debate.

"The spirit of which I speak creates imaginary and magnifies real causes of complaint; arrogates to itself every virtue - denies every merit to its opponents; secretly entertains the worst designs...mounts the pulpit, and, in the name of a God of mercy and peace, preaches discord and vengeance; invokes the worst scourges of heaven, war, pestilence, and famine, as preferable alternatives to party defeat; blind, vindictive, cruel, remorseless, unprincipled, and at last frantic, it communicates its madness to friends as well as foes; respects nothing, fears nothing."

What I can't figure out is how Livingston was able to access blogs in 1830.