Senator Cochran survived by appealing to non-traditional participants in Republican primary elections. He asked black voters to help him win. And so he won.

Chris McDaniel cried foul. He refused to concede. In fact, he promises to go to court over the vote.

Thanks to illegal voting from liberal Democrats, my opponent stole last week’s runoff election, but I’m not going down without a fight.

- Chris McDaniel, in a mass email, July 2, 2014

Slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, housing, voting are issues that echo into today's reality. For all the sleight of hand, everyone knows how the shell game has been played. Racial Conservatives have moved from one shell to another, from the Democratic Party of old to the Republican Party of today and tomorrow.

Plantation, conservative at heart, Party of Lincoln. The arguments vanish in the wind as outraged conservatives make a new case for truth. It is the truth that was already apparent.

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Greg Abbott is not just the Republican candidate for governor. He is also the Attorney General of Texas. He ordered state agencies, including the State Health Services Department to no longer release any information on vast amounts of dangerous chemicals corporate neighbors are storing, including explosives.

Attorney General Abbott came up with what you might call the Nosy Neighbor Principle. Residents can drive around a neighborhood, knocking on the doors of friendly business owners, and simply ask what hazardous substances, including chemicals and explosives, they store.

A Texas law requires companies to furnish information about certain hazardous substances. But there is a twist.

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The tension between economic realism and political realism resulted in a reduced economic stimulus that still succeeded in pulling the country away from a solid depression. The recession that remained was beyond painful for many Americans. Jobs were lost, homes were foreclosed.

Enough Democrats pushed for a middle path to get what economists predicted.

It was a recovery. It was a weak recovery, but it was a recovery.

The public had opinions about the stimulus. But they didn't vote based on their opinions.

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As emperors go, Hadrian is regarded by students of history as one of the best. He was quite popular among the military and the people of Rome were with him.

The Senate had a big, big problem, though. Hadrian was born in Spain, one of the many conquered lands. So he was not to be considered a real Roman. Certainly not one of those born to the upper, upper classes. This outsider should have been a slave, not a ruler.

I sometimes wonder about the stupidly selfish way the Senate dealt with the only Roman Emperor at the time who had come from the provinces. It could have been an opportunity to promote the fiction of a "dream that was Rome." Imagine Rome as an ideal in which those conquered could rise to rule. Imagine how that might have cemented the loyalty of subjects.

Parallels with patriotism in American stop when it comes to a July 4 dream.

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Whenever key evidence simply disappears from an arena of controversy, alarm bells go off. These missing emails happen to be a case in point.

We have to ask a more basic question. If that large a gap in the official record exists, how many other key pieces of evidence are missing? What other email messages have vanished?

When a public official suddenly resigns, and so much documentation turns out to be missing, is it any wonder suspicions will spread?

But there is another side. There are reasonable explanations.

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I never thought of him as a comedian until I came across a bit of history a few months ago.

Then, a Tea Party candidate in Oklahoma again reminded me of Benjamin Franklin last week, and how he faked out an unethical rival, and made him deny his own death for years.

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Disagree with the President as many of my friends do, you kind of have to admit, in more honest moments, that this President is among the most straight arrow people around. No financial dirt. No extra-marital affairs. "No Drama Obama" is not just a personality trait. It seems to be a personal ethic.

But, after years of effort, Republicans have finally uncovered a criminal conspiracy with illegal trading of insider knowledge. And it involves Obamacare.

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Hillary Clinton can become a great President, if she stops trying to think of herself as one of us.

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Ancient Romans considered themselves superior to those they conquered. What is often unexamined in popular history is the attitude of Roman elites toward the Emperor Hadrian.

They thought of Hadrian as unworthy. He was not considered a real Roman. He came from one of the conquered territories. Such people were inferior, uncivilized, unclean. They were to be tamed, not to be followed.

Ancient Senators who looked down on Hadrian as a pretend Roman have modern descendants.

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As the Empress and her entourage made their way down the Dnieper River, the governor had his men erect a fake village and dress up as peasants. As soon as the procession was out of sight, the village would be disassembled, hastily transported down the river before the Empress could arrive, and then reassembled.

The Empress and her group saw dozens of healthy, productive villages, populated by industrious peasants who looked remarkably alike.

Centuries later she is back in suit and tie, disguised as a US Senator.

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