downton abbey returns for its second season next week in the uk but americans will have to wait (wink) until january for the bastardized version that pbs will likely offer. last year they chopped off at least an hour so they could create 4 11/2hour episodes instead of the 7 hour long episodes shown in the uk. still baffles me as to why. maybe they had to get to the doowop reruns offered during pledge week.
its sort of a hackneyed upstairs/downstairs period drama but its well done if you like that sort of thing.
and season three has already been greenlit so you can set your dvrs ahead of time for january 2013.
The Republican Party, at its core, does not favor the government doing anything about anything unless it is to make life a bit easier for their paymasters. They do not want health care reform by any description, but they cannot say that, otherwise they are easily attacked about not being interested in rising health care costs or the plight of the uninsured. They never wanted Medicare, and have tried on at least two occasions -- Gingrich in the 1990s, and Ryan in 2011 -- to change its fundamental structure. In both cases, their orwellian word guru, Frank Luntz, told them to say they were "strengthening" Medicare.
They do not want immigration reform of any stripe. Maddow's 8/19 program referenced Republican insistence on improved border control as a prerequisite for voting on the 'path-to-citizenship' that is the only solution other than mass deportation of 11 million people to the problem. The Obama administration was snookered as well -- having beefed up border security by 3-fold, and by deporting more undocumented workers than "W," they thought they had 'earned' a vote on comprehensive reform.