Some Random Facts

150 years after the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, a black man was President of the United States.
50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the same.

The Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote in US elections, was ratified in August 1920.

Manufacturing

Beth Levine, a spokeswoman for Sen. Charles Grassley, when questioned about the far-too-numerous vacancies in the federal judiciary. called it "a manufactured crisis".

I think she meant "controversy", but let's take her at her word. It is a crisis, and it has been manufactured - by her boss and his Republican colleagues in the Senate and especially in the Judiciary Committee, which he chairs.

It's sad, really. He once was one of the reasonable Republicans, like Richard Lugar and Robert Bennett. Whatever happened to those guys, anyway?

(That's a rhetorical question.)