Hrrrmmm
We spend every day listening to cable news all day long. Literally. So our prism is something of a distorted one. But through every channel and medium through which I absorb the national political debate, it was impossible to miss the tsunami of silly that overcame the nation yesterday as we focused on what is apparently the most critical aspect of evaluating the danger of and fighting ISIL: namely, the vocabulary we use. Who cannot take note of the fact that armchair warriors and toughs who generally have no patience with words and think only force counts seem to believe that the great national question before us comes down to what words we use? Let's call this faction the verbalists. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/west-collapses-in-spasm-of-verbalist-derp
Jeb: I'm My Own Man, Just Ask My Family
Did The Daily Caller make up this a phony quote? I've generally ignored this Marie Harf sub-drama . How much of a glutton for punishment do I need to be? From a distance it sounded like a clumsy expression of a fairly straightforward point, which is that endemic poverty, social stagnation and repression are often breeding grounds of extremism and terrorist violence. To hear versions of this argument you need look no further than the well-known liberals in the Bush administration who frequently made the argument that poverty, corruption and lack of democracy were the breeding ground of terrorist recruitment in the Muslim world - those dreaded 'root causes.' So tonight I found my way to an article in the Daily Caller with a follow up outrage by Harf (now it's her undergraduate thesis) reported by Patrick Howley. And in that piece he quotes the part of her exchange with Chris Matthews in which she said, "We need to get to the root cause of terrorism, and that is poverty and lack of opportunity in the terrorist community." http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/hrrrmm
West Collapses in Spasm of Verbalist Derp
After the 9/11 greatness, Rudy Giuliani decided to spend the remainder of his days dedicated to stamping out whatever admiration or good will he'd gained from those two or three months with years of hate speech , nonsense and aggravated derp. Derp after the jump. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dark-rudy
Dark Rudy
As we ramp up our Prime longform offerings, one of the biggest challenges is finding just the right people to commission to report and write the pieces we're most interested in publishing. So I'm starting this Josh's Assignment Desk feature. Basically here are articles we're looking to publish. Who are the best reporters out there who could tackle them? Here are two I want to publish. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/joshs-assignment-desk
Josh's Assignment Desk
I'm not sure it's completely penetrated the public consciousness that when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in King v. Burwell next month and votes on the case in private conference two weeks from tomorrow that Obamacare really is on the line, and the ultimate outcome is very, very uncertain. As a sign of how dire things are for Obamacare, defenders of the law are crafting their arguments for Chief Justice John Roberts and making what is essentially a political argument : that the integrity and viability of the Supreme Court as an institution is on the line in this case. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/john-roberts-obamacare-king-burwell
Do You Realize How Much Jeopardy Obamacare Is In?
Jeb Bush's new line appears to be I'm my own man, except when it comes to the guys I hire to tell me what to think. As Steve Holland and Philip Klein note, Jeb's list of advisors are chock full of cronies, hangers on and appointees of his father and his brother. There's James Baker, Paul Wolfowitz!, Tom Ridge, Mike Chertoff, Steve Hadley, Mike Hayden and more. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/jeb-im-my-own-man-just-ask-my-family
