On Tuesday, CNN's Jim Acosta asked President Obama about "what some people are calling 'your best week ever.'" Acosta played up that "you had two Supreme Court decisions supportive of the Affordable Care Act and of gay rights. You also delivered a speech down in Charleston that was pretty warmly received." The correspondent then underlined that 'it seems that you've built up some political capital for the remaining months of your presidency." He asked, "I'm curious, how you want to use it? What hard things do you want to tackle at this point?"

It’s likely that most NewsBusters readers are familiar with the grimly humorous saying “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” Last Friday, UCLA professor of public policy Mark Kleiman opined in so many words that the Republican party’s beatings in presidential elections will continue until its mental health improves.

In a Friday Washington Monthly post, Kleiman mocked conservatives for their allegedly fanciful belief that their “frivolous” arguments in King v. Burwell would carry the day and predicted that Republicans probably have a few more years of delusion and defeat ahead of them: “It’s possible that a convincing [Hillary] Clinton win and a Democratic recapture of the Senate in 2016 will shock the GOP back to reality. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Feeding right-wing fury is a profitable venture financially, and it works well enough electorally in off-years to keep the hustle going. My guess is that it will take a Clinton re-election landslide in 2020 to do the job.”

Conservatives are accustomed to admiring the work and deploring the politics of artists like Bruce Springsteen and Stephen King. Michael Tomasky wrote Thursday that some liberals have had roughly similar feelings about Antonin Scalia, but that’s over now because of Scalia’s dissent in King v. Burwell, which was devoid of the justice’s usual “writerly flair and intellectual acumen.”

“It long ago became a kind of fetish, the anticipation of reading Scalia’s opinions,” remarked Tomasky. “There was always an excess of intellectual and moral certitude, to be sure, but there was also wit and a kind of joyfulness of battle whether he was on the winning or losing side…But that was then. This decision is something else again. Here, there is no wit. There is just bile. As you read along you can veritably see his carotid artery pulsing, growing; smell the sweat flopping out of the pores...The law lives, and he is livid.”

After the first broadcast network special reports on Friday morning about the Supreme Court’s decision to approve gay marriage, they returned hours later to gush after President Obama’s remarks how “eloquently” he spoke and pronounce him to be “the America of tomorrow” as an “angry” Antonin Scalia comes to grips with the news that “his side” of “the culture battle” “has lost.” ABC News correspondent Terry Moran hyped after the President’s speech how “Scalia is angry again” by having “cast scorn” on the majority ruling in his dissenting opinion. 

During ABC’s Special Report on the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage, correspondent Terry Moran gushed that the reaction to the ruling by the crowd gathered outside the Court was akin to “a spark of fire as we understood what was actually done here” as “those interns ran across the plaza.”