Dana Milbank shows how the latest GOP contender has already demonstrated that he is not The One.
What Rudy Giuliani did this week was stupid.
What Scott Walker did ought to disqualify him as a serious presidential contender.
As the world now knows, Giuliani, the former New York mayor, said at a dinner featuring Walker, the Wisconsin governor, that “I do not believe that the president loves America.” ...
And Walker, just a few seats away, said . . . nothing. Asked the next morning on CNBC about Giuliani’s words, the Republican presidential aspirant was spineless: “The mayor can speak for himself. I’m not going to comment on what the president thinks or not. He can speak for himself as well. I’ll tell you, I love America, and I think there are plenty of people — Democrat, Republican, independent, everyone in between — who love this country.” ...
This week saw the harvest of a bumper crop of crazy, much of it occasioned by Obama’s efforts to make clear that the United States isn’t at war with Islam... His language on Islam is essentially the same as George W. Bush’s, but no matter.
... Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) said he found the Iranian regime and Obama “unusually the same” in their disregard for the rule of law. The conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza, tweeting a photo of Obama taking a selfie, added the message: “YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO . . . Watch this vulgar man show his stuff, while America cowers in embarrassment.”
... (This week, a South Dakota state lawmaker, on his official Web site, likened Planned Parenthood to the Islamic State terrorists who behead hostages.) The problem here is the venom is being sanctioned, even seconded, by those who would lead the Republican Party.
There's a test for tuberculosis in which components of the bacteria are injected into the skin. Those who have already been infected with the bacilli will have a strong reaction. Apparently, there's an an equally effective test for racism: have President Obama say something perfectly reasonable, or do something absolutely normal. Those people infected with the bacteria of racism will reliably flare up in red-faced rage, no matter what the subject or how casual the action.
And Scott Walker? Scott Walker is just this year's... uh, you know. That guy who last season looked like a reasonable candidate but by the time the first voting started, no one could remember his name. Which was... oh, you know.
Come on in. Let's see what the rest of punditry is up to.
Leonard Pitts bids farewell to the man who many of us have spent our nights with for years.
I am not insane. For this, I have Jon Stewart to thank.
Thirteen years ago, it felt like I was in a front-row seat on the express train to Crazy Town. That, you will recall, is when the wheels began to come off the Bush administration’s argument for invading Iraq, i.e., to find the weapons of mass destruction. But of course, there were no such weapons, an inconvenient truth to which Team Bush responded with a new, after-the-fact rationale. Now, the argument for war was and always had been the need to free the poor, suffering Iraqi people. ...
Jon Stewart is why I’m not crazy. With his recent announcement that he will be leaving the show this year, I figure now is the time for a thank-you long overdue.
As always, give this column a full read. But I'm not yet ready to accept the truth of these words. Jon Stewart isn't leaving. No sir. Do not accept.
Frank Bruni on those old familiar names.
Last week began with the comedy extravaganza of the “Saturday Night Live” reunion, but not one of its sketches or jokes was half as funny as four words three days later by Jeb Bush.
“I’m my own man,” he said.
And he kept a straight face somehow.
... immediately following the speech, donors sought to buy him.
It was estimated that at back-to-back fund-raisers, he hauled in about $4 million for his Right to Rise PAC and for a “super PAC” that supports him. ...
Those dollars come with expectations. Money almost always does.
Bush is no more his own man than Hillary Clinton is her own woman. And in her case, too, I’m not talking about the imprint of her family, specifically a husband who served two terms in the White House and still looms impossibly large and loquacious on the post-presidential stage.
I’m talking about financial ties — past, present, future. I’m talking about the reality, growing ever more pronounced and ominous, that you can’t run for a major, fiercely contested political office in this country without becoming a monstrous, ceaseless, insatiable Hoover of money.
How can any candidate run against the tide of money? Even those that work to gain the bulk of their funds in small donations, still serve a system that's dependent on a wash of big dollar, and donations that come wrapped in the ribbon of a "bundler" often bear expectations just as clear as those that come from Mr. Bigwig Singleissue Voter. As we go into an election where a billion dollars moves from astounding to commonplace, is there any candidate willing to make reducing the dollars a cause to... get out the dollars?
Ross Douthat measures the reformatude of the GOP candidates.
... the Republicans pondering a run for president in 2016 all seem to sense that they need do to things a little, well, differently if they expect to ultimately win.
Maybe that means talking more about inequality — even putting it right in the heart of your economic pitch, as Jeb Bush seems intent on doing. Maybe it means trying to reach constituencies (young, black, Hispanic) that the Romney campaign mostly wrote off, which is what Rand Paul thinks his libertarian message can accomplish. Maybe it means projecting the most Middle American, Kohl’s-shopping, non-Bain Capital image possible — which is why the recent media fascination with Scott Walker’s lack of a college diploma was probably a boon to the Wisconsin governor. ...
One reason issues like immigration and education are appealing to Republican politicians looking to change their party’s image is that policy change in these areas seems relatively cheap — more green cards here, new curricular standards there, and nothing that requires donors and interest groups to part with their favorite subsidies and tax breaks.
But you can’t reform the tax code or health care that easily, which is why those issues offer better, tougher tests of whether a would-be conservative reformer should be taken seriously.
It's actually not a bad test, much as I hate the way "the economy" is allowed to dominate political debates, usually on assumptions that hold less water than the Atacama. Here's a clearer indicator: the first person in
either party who runs on the need to raise the top tax rate, and the rate on capital gains, as a means of combating the rampant inequality in our society, is the real reformer.
The New York Times on calls to combine campuses with guns.
The gun lobby is flirting with self-parody as it exploits the issue of sexual assaults on college campuses by proposing a solution of — what else? — having students carry guns. Experts who study the complicated issue of predatory behavior and advise colleges point out that rapes often begin in social situations. “It would be nearly impossible to run for a gun,” said John Foubert, the national president of One in Four, a rape-prevention organization.
Such common sense, however, has never deterred statehouse politicians when it comes to obeying the gun lobby. Lawmakers in 10 states are busy adapting the issue of campus sexual assaults to the campaign to arm college students. Carrying concealed weapons on college campuses is now banned in 41 states by law or university policy.
I don't usually bring the last paragraph into one of these quotes, but in this case...
As the debate goes forward, legislators would be wise to resort to some facts and consider a new study, based on federal data, by the Violence Policy Center. It strongly suggests that states with weak gun-safety laws and high rates of gun ownership lead the nation in gun deaths.
Edward Frenkel and the inescapable weirdness of being.
In Akira Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon,” a samurai has been murdered, but it’s not clear why or by whom. Various characters involved tell their versions of the events, but their accounts contradict one another. You can’t help wondering: Which story is true? ...
This month, a paper published online in the journal Nature Physics presents experimental research ... that there is a “Rashomon effect” not just in our descriptions of nature, but in nature itself.
Yes, despite a century of poking, quantum remains as frustratingly frustrating as ever, but the article is a good read to see the lengths nature goes to in resisting any final resolution.