Morning Briefing
For February 26, 2013
1. Jane Mayer’s McCarthyist Attack on Ted Cruz
The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, in a pair of blog posts, served up the latest attempted Democratic Party talking point on freshman Texas Senator Ted Cruz: that Senator Cruz is the second coming of Joe McCarthy. (ThinkProgress coordinates with a predictable illustration for those too simple-minded to get Mayer’s point). As it happens, I have some firsthand knowledge of the subject of Mayer’s vague, thinly-sourced hit job. She’ll have to do better next time, because Ted Cruz is right about Harvard Law School in the mid-1990s. If she’d talked to more people, she might have figured that out. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
2. Why are Firemen Always the First To Be Laid Off?
Maybe because we’ll miss them the most.
Because the President has forgotten he’s already been elected and he’s been campaigning across the country to defeat his own idea, there are too many sources to quote regarding the dire consequences President Obama sees if the sequester, or Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), isn’t averted. So without individual attribution here are some of the services we will lose.
Local first responders–fire, police, EMS.
Teachers.
Military “readiness” and “preparedness.”
Airport security and TSA.
Homeland Security. Border Patrol.
FEMA, FDA, NASA.
(Wait a minute, wasn’t NASA killed last year? Here’s one that’s for sure going to save money: the National Drug Intelligence Center, still slated for a $2 million cut to a $20 million dollar budget. Buy it was closed on 6/15/2012. Why does it need a budget?)
FBI, NRC, the federal prison system, SEC.
Sounds awful, until we notice that these “cuts” come out of a budget that’s already scheduled to increase more than the cuts amount to. And that Republicans have offered to give the President emergency authority to allocate these cuts in ways that are “least harmful.” . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
3. Another Reason Mitt Romney Lost: He Had A Full Blown Idiot (Stuart Stevens) Running His Campaign.
Sometime before Election Day, before the debates, people already knew Stuart Stevens and his team were in over their heads. From the utter fiasco of Romney’s convention speech, which he stripped down to a thin gruel of bland forgettable pablum (and of course, stripped of any mention of America’s servicemen and women abroad), throwing aside Bush’s micro-targetting programmed wholesale, allowing his Hollywood aspirations to make him give the prime speaking slot at the RNC to Clint Eastwood (without any vetting) instead of people who would humanize his candidate, I just thought at the time, that Stu Stevens was simply disorganized.
Then, we found out about ORCA, and the fact that Stevens and his team (Moffat, et al.) still thought the system performed well because … “metrics”. Then came the revelation that Stevens had no concept of the idea that what voters tell pollsters is often quite different from what would actually influence them in favor of candidate A or B. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
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