Lincoln Chafee has dropped out of the presidential race.

I’m sure his supporter will be disappointed.

News flash: Paul Ryan has announced that he’ll run for Speaker of the House if the GOP will pick out all the brown M&M’s first.

Here’s that video from Colbert about nobody wanting to become Speaker of the House. It’s still funny (and still kinda not funny).

The other night on a friend’s recommendation I recorded Stephen Colbert’s show to catch a bit he did on the multi-car pileup that is the House Speaker’s succession. (Or, I guess, secession. For two men in a row.)  The piece was indeed hilarious.

I wound up watching all of the show (although fast-forwarding a rather empty interview with James Corden who, yes, can sing and dance, but who seems to have nothing to say) and then came upon the musical guest:  Halsey. I recognized her song, “New Americana,” which is at #95 on the U.S. charts but constantly on my radio, and decided to learn a little more about her. I looked her up and learned that she’s 21, grew up about 30 miles away from my birthplace, and is biracial, bisexual, and bipolar. And then it occurred to me that, even 10 years ago, any one of those three would have disqualified you for any number of things; now you can be on network TV and mention all of it in your official biography.

Meanwhile, the GOP is acting far crazier than any of the bipolar people I know.

I’ll give you a hint: She’s running for President.

If you haven’t yet, please invest the 12 minutes to watch the President’s statement about today’s mass shooting, at a community college in Oregon. I say “today’s,” because we now have one every day. Given that these shootings are now business as usual, you may not have seen this.

There’s an old saying in journalism, that dog-bites-man isn’t a story, but man-bites-dog is, because the latter is so unusual. I remember when the Colombine high-school-shooting massacre happened in 1999, the news was not just awful, as today’s was, but also breathtaking. How could this happen? It was so massive, so unusual, so man-bites-dog. I was in an airport — in Colorado, I believe — and started making and receiving cellphone calls about the massacre, as every television station in the airport started carrying news about it.

Now it’s 16 years later, and we’ve made zero progress on gun violence, and we now reside in a time when there’s a mass shooting every day, so it’s not unusual. It’s dog-bites-man.

For the record, I like guns. I used to like them for hunting, and I’ve always liked them for target practice — either paper targets, or cans, or skeet. More than 40 years after learning how to shoot as a boy, I’m still a good shot. Most of my family shoots, most of them for target practice, some of them still for hunting. I’m not anti-gun. I’m anti-gun-massacres.

A few years ago, there was a study that showed that more gun laws equate with fewer gun deaths. Here’s some reporting on that. I don’t want all the guns rounded up. (That’s impossible anyway.) I want better profiling, I want a slower application process, and whatever else will help restrict crazy people from easily accessing automatic weapons and taking them to college campuses, shopping centers, movie theaters, and every single other place that we congregate.

I want the idea of mass shootings in this country to become unusual again.

Jeffrey Toobin feels differently than I do about John Boehner.

Leadership is ultimately tabulated from results. I can’t think of any positive results for Boehner. But I still believe he wanted to do better.

I have a number of friends who have been influential and highly placed Republicans. (I say “have been” because most of them have left the party. Or, perhaps more appropriately, the party has left them.) They’ve run campaigns, or served in significant roles in various statehouse or federal administrations. Two years ago, I was having lunch with one of them when I heard myself saying, “I kind of like John Boehner. I don’t agree with him, but I think he’s an American patriot. And I feel sorry for him.”

Yesterday, when I saw that he resigned,  while my Democrat friends were cheering, my heart sank. As I posted on one liberal friend’s Facebook page, “We’ll see how much you like what comes next.”

Vitriol isn’t new to American politics, and isn’t new to politics anywhere. (As the histories of ancient Greece and Rome attest.) But I wish we had less of it, and more focus on areas where viewpoints converge to fix actual problems. One of my former-Republican friends advises people to find the area of agreement and work on that. To do that, people have to stay civil. We could use more of that.

I’ve done my fair share of mocking political leaders I don’t agree with; lately, unless they’re truly vile or evil (same word, spelled differently), I resist. I woke up this morning again to find hundreds of my Facebook friends going on about John Boehner’s “orange skin” and his propensity for tears, and giving ha-ha-ha’s at him. Here’s what I feel I know about John Boehner:  because he came from humble origins, he was indeed frequently moved by finding himself second in line to the presidency; because he actually cared not only about the aims of his party but the needs of the country, he tried to wrangle a recurring heretic mob into agreement. Was he a successful Speaker? No. Will we like what comes next? No. Part of me believes that Boehner is doing this now so that he can go out on his own terms — refusing to shut down the government again, because now he’s free to work a deal with whomever he likes.

One of Boehner’s stated goals was to be an historic Speaker. I can’t find a previous example of a Speaker stepping down in precisely this fashion. So now he’s made history. It’s not the history he wanted, and not the one we should have wanted either.

Remember this guy?

Now we’ve got this guy.

One didn’t win. The other isn’t going to either. But in the meantime, they’re video stars. Of a sort.

The news piece I’m about to link to is my favorite thing on the Internet right now. But first, a little background.

This time last year, comedian Russell Brand was encouraging people not to vote, partly because he never has, but largely, he claimed, because voting effects no change. Well, I can predict one change for sure: If you don’t vote your interests, the votes of other people, with interests opposed to yours, will count for more. Because there will be more of them. So let’s say you’re concerned about climate change and would like to see more research and funding, but you decide that your vote doesn’t count, so you don’t show up, and that all of your pals — the cultural elite who will even know who Russell Brand is — don’t show up either. Guess who will still be coming out. I think you see where this is going.

Anyway, here’s Brand’s infamous interview from last year:

Now, a year later and in an election season, an unlikely voice of tradition and reason has shown up to give Brand the finger. Yes, I speak of none other than Johnny Rotten. Mr. Rotten, whom some of us know as probably the most influential singer of the latter half of the 20th century, and who came to prominence in a band called The Sex Pistols (still an unbeatable band name), declaims that Russell Brand is a “bumhole,” and provides the public this seemingly rather un-punk-like advice: “Get smart, read as much as you can and find out who’s using you. I did. What’s wrong with you?”

Here’s the whole story. This makes me gloriously happy. The Sex Pistols were punks because of the failure of the establishment, just as Jonathan Swift was making a moralist point when he advised that the Irish end the famine by eating their own children. Mistaking The Sex Pistols and their ilk as stupid louts always reminds me of the line Joey Ramone shared about the Ramones, who right from the start were profitable and who always, always made money: “We’re dumb, but we’re not stupid.”