Open thread: Watching watch dogs (and poor people) die

Global prosperity for all is not yet at hand—and, painful and indeed shocking as this may be to recognize, the day in which all humanity can expect to be included in the march toward ever greater affluence cannot be foreseen with any confidence.

A sobering article from Commentary Magazine, well worth your time.

Hat tip to a new reader for digging up this great coverage of Burr's incredibly lame performance in his last debate with Elaine. Please go read it.

More bad news for American politics: Richard Burr, the senior U.S. Senator from North Carolina, thinks the nation’s founders wrote the 14th Amendment.

This sad bit of knowledge drifts my way almost 45 minutes into his third and final debate with Secretary of State Elaine Marshall. After a tense exchange involving the biological or voluntary nature of homosexuality (about which more will be said), moderator Judy Woodruff moves to safer ground. She mentions the recent Republican movement to repeal the 14th Amendment so that “among other things, children of undocumented immigrants would no longer automatically become citizens.”

Burr says that he doesn’t believe in tinkering with the amendment, but does believe that courts should decide whether it’s been interpreted correctly. He bolsters this contradictory sentiment with the money quote: “It’s important for us to have that arbitrator, the courts, to come in and tell us ‘did our founders, when they wrote the 14th amendment … did they have something else envisioned?’”

The 14th Amendment was adopted on July 9, 1868. James Madison was the last surviving signer of the U.S. Constitution. He died in 1836.