I've been working on a project in Germany for the last month.  This is 7 days a week stuff, but I'm enjoying it immensely. I don't have to deal with American cable news, for starters.

Some pointless phrase would be yanked out of context and transformed into the latest distraction, entertainment and deeply concerning scandal. The fact that we liberals still don't understand this point helps prove a blindingly obvious fact:

Our tribe is largely ineducable.

[...]

Would something like that happen? Liberals, please! Did you hear that Candidate Clinton made a remark on one occasion, in 1996, using a term which was in widespread use by many players at that point in time? Did you hear that she made that one remark, on that one occasion, twenty years ago? On exactly one occasion?

That's our latest exciting scandal! That's the way we humans now "reason" within our deeply unimpressive failing political culture.

We're death-defyingly silly and dumb. We just aren't serious people. Our major candidates all know this, and conduct themselves accordingly.

"In a major victory for a Duxbury father, a federal appeals court has urged a bankruptcy judge to consider a settlement that would allow the man to erase more than $246,000 he still owes on student loans he borrowed to send his three children to college."

"A bankruptcy judge and district court judge ruled that Murphy failed to prove repaying the loans was an undue hardship, as required under the bankruptcy law.

But, on Tuesday, four months after the US First Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the case and urged the parties to try to settle, the company signed an agreement acknowledging that Murphy's debt should be forgiven because he has proven that repaying it would pose an undue hardship."

Weird political dynamics on this one, on one side

The administration, which argues that the legislation would put Americans at legal risk overseas, has been lobbying so intently against the bill that some lawmakers and families of Sept. 11 victims are infuriated. In their view, the Obama administration has consistently sided with the kingdom and has thwarted their efforts to learn what they believe to be the truth about the role some Saudi officials played in the terrorist plot.

a Congress fractured by bitter partisanship, especially during an election year. It is sponsored by Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York. It has the support of an unlikely coalition of liberal and conservative senators, including Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, and Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. It passed through the Judiciary Committee in January without dissent.

The governing narrative of the 2016 Presidential campaign so far has been that GOP is imploding. All it took was the adolescent agitprop of Donald Trump to lay bare the rift between the Party Establishment (i.e. corporate donors) and the Party Base, whose anxieties and prejudices they have been manipulating for decades.

In fact, more than half of the lower house members who voted Sunday face accusations of corruption or serious crimes, while President Rousseff has not been charged with anything.

Things could get very ugly before they get better in Latin America's largest and most powerful country, which only emerged from military dictatorship in 1985.

Roberts got a relatively late start in her show business career, which began at age 35 with an appearance on television's "Studio One." She labored diligently if somewhat anonymously as a character actress on stage and screen for the better part of three decades, before first really catching the attention of producers and critics in 1983 with a dazzling supporting performance on NBC's medical drama "St. Elsewhere, " which won her the first of her five Emmy Awards.

Ms. Roberts' stint as Ray Romano's well meaning but intrusive mother on "Everybody Loves Raymond" (1996-2005) quickly established her as an unlikely but quickly beloved pop icon at age 71, and brought her seven more Emmy nominations and four more awards, as well as a SAG award as part of the show's ensemble cast. "Raymond" continues to run extensively through cable syndication.

And she's being remembered today by both Romano and co-star Patricia Heaton as the consummate professional who, with her TV husband the late Peter Boyle, took the show's two young and talented but nervous lead actors under wing and gave them the confidence and support necessary to carry the show on their shoulders.