Tim Mak:
Rep. Steve Scalise, the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives and a Tea Party favorite, is facing a political firestorm over the revelation that he spoke before a white supremacist organization as a Louisiana state legislator in 2002. [...] But the idea that Scalise might have been entirely ignorant about the nature of the white supremacist organization strains belief, said Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“The fact that Scalise was pandering for votes and support at a white supremacy event is horrifying. This is David Duke’s organization, not someone no one has ever heard of,” she told The Daily Beast. In 1991, Duke, a convicted felon and former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, had been the Republican Party gubernatorial nominee in Louisiana, drawing national derision. “You’re a Louisiana politician. You cannot plead ignorance about David Duke.”
Far from pleading ignorance about Duke, Scalise was described by Roll Call in 1999 as saying he “embraces many of the same ‘conservative’ views as Duke, but is far more viable” as a candidate for an open congressional seat.
Russel Berman at The Atlantic:
For House Republicans, the revelation continues what has been a bumpy period following a successful November election. Representative Michael Grimm of New York pleaded guilty to tax fraud last week but is resisting calls for his resignation, while the office of Representative Blake Farenthold of Texas is facing a lawsuit from a former staffer who is alleging she was sexually harassed. Now one of the party's top leaders must answer for a 12-year-old speech he gave to a white supremacist group, and at a time when racial tensions are once again a topic of national debate.
Oh, and now
this, via Robert Costa at The Washington Post:
Rep. Michael G. Grimm (R-N.Y.), who pleaded guilty in federal court last week to felony tax fraud, announced late Monday that he will resign from Congress effective next week.
Much more on the day's top stories below the fold.
Blake Zeff has more on Grimm:
It will take some time, specifically until the announcement of his criminal sentence, to fully appreciate the snow job Michael Grimm just pulled on Staten Island voters. But we already know plenty enough to call it a criminal’s virtuoso parting heist. [...]
Hand it to the former congressman, though; he was a pretty good actor during this campaign. For all of 2014, he strutted across his district conveying the confidence of an artful blackjack dealer. Sure there were charges against him, he said, but they were trumped up, he was the victim of a liberal witch hunt, his political opponents were after him precisely because he was such an awesome Republican. You get the idea.
On the issue of police force behavior in New York,
The New York Times forcefully sides with de Blasio:
Mayor Bill de Blasio has spent weeks expressing his respect and admiration for the New York Police Department, while calling for unity in these difficult days, but the message doesn’t seem to be sinking in. [...]
Mr. de Blasio isn’t going to say it, but somebody has to: With these acts of passive-aggressive contempt and self-pity, many New York police officers, led by their union, are squandering the department’s credibility, defacing its reputation, shredding its hard-earned respect. They have taken the most grave and solemn of civic moments — a funeral of a fallen colleague — and hijacked it for their own petty look-at-us gesture. In doing so, they also turned their backs on Mr. Ramos’s widow and her two young sons, and others in that grief-struck family.
These are disgraceful acts, which will be compounded if anyone repeats the stunt at Officer Liu’s funeral on Sunday.
The Los Angeles Times takes on "Citizenship 101":
In a 2008 article written with former Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, O'Connor argued that “civic education has been in steady decline over the past generation, as high-stakes testing and an emphasis on literacy and math dominate school reforms. Too many young people today do not understand how our political system works.”
Unfortunately, O'Connor is right. A survey of adults conducted in September by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania found that only 36% could name all three branches of the U.S. government; 35% couldn't name even one. Only 27% of respondents knew that it requires a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate to override a president's veto, and 21% wrongly thought that a 5-4 Supreme Court decision must be returned to Congress for reconsideration. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg center, said the survey “offers dramatic evidence of the need for more and better civics education.”
Joshua Keating takes a look at what's happening in Afghanistan:
For one thing, while the president may have assured the public Sunday that “the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,” that verdict comes with considerable caveats. About 13,500 international troops, 9,800 of them Americans, will remain in the country thanks to a deal reached with Afghanistan’s new government in September. These troops will serve in non-combat roles, including training Afghan security forces and assisting in counterterrorism missions. A full pullout isn’t scheduled until the end of 2016.
Iraq saw a similar “noncombat” transitional period in 2010 and 2011, but the line between combat and noncombat isn’t always entirely clear. The Taliban certainly don’t recognize the distinction, and whatever U.S. troops may intend, they can sometimes find themselves under fire. As defense scholar Andrew Krepinevich told the New York Times in 2008, “If you’re in combat, it doesn’t make any difference whether you’re an adviser: you’re risking your life. The bullets don’t have ‘adviser’ stenciled on some and ‘combat unit’ on another.”
And, on a final note, kudos to
Damon Linker for doing what all journalists and pundits should do -- reflect on what they got right and wrong over the past year:
The internet rewards glibness, especially when it comes to opinion. But for those glibly expressed opinions to be more than mere spouting off, they need to be informed, intelligent, smart. I pride myself on finding the right balance between shooting off my mouth and writing overly cautious academic treatises. Most of the time I think I succeed.
But not always. And certainly not the two times I got it wrong in 2014.