It’s painful to watch Marco Rubio try to deal with the bad bet he appears to have made on immigration reform. He’s now floating that idea that if reform doesn’t pass President Obama will unilaterally legalize all undocumented immigrants currently in the US.
After I wrote this piece yesterday about the defining role of rising and fallen murder rates (and violent crime generally) in shaping American politics over the last half century, I got numerous replies saying, “Hey, didn’t you know this issue has been solved and the issue was lead poisoning for a generation of Americans?” This was addressed to the second part of the post which focused on my claim that we still have very little sense of why the murder rate spiked and then fell or what to do about it. So I wanted to address this theory. Read More
TPM Reader BY says yes, McConnell’s troubles may hurtled the nation toward debt default and destruction. But it’s even worse than that.
I worked in the Senate over the 2009-2011 period that saw the influx of the Tea Party folks, and while I think you’re definitely right to focus on the McConnell situation, I think one key fact is generally given short shrift in all of this discussion.