Somehow I doubt this will lead to a flood of subpoenas: a 2006 climate change denial report commissioned by the then-GOP controlled House Energy and Commerce Committee turns out to have been largely plagiarized from various textbooks and Wikipedia.

I wanted to follow up briefly, but in a separate post, to the email below from TPM Reader G. Read More

A blistering read from longtime TPM Reader I’ll just identify as G …

For me, it’s the arbitrariness of it, the extremely poor attitudes of the TSA employees, and the fact that it doesn’t seem to actually accomplish all that much more than pre-9/11 airport security.

A few thoughts:

I’m a lawyer. I go through security checkpoints all the time. Went through one at the local criminal courthouse this morning. They x-rayed my stuff, sent me through a metal detector, and then had me come back through it to pick up my stuff when they were done looking at it on the monitor. Done. 30 seconds. The lawyer’s line at the courthouse is ever-so-slightly less rigid than the general public line (if it’s obviously my belt buckle setting off the detector, they’ve never made me take it off; they’ve learned to accept that lawyers often keep calendars on their smartphones so we don’t have to check them before entering the building, though they check to make sure the ringer is off), but even the general public line is pretty much what we were used to pre-9/11. X ray machine. Metal detector. Wand if they can’t quickly figure out what’s setting off the detector. Pat downs only if you’re still setting off the detector and nothing’s visible. 45 seconds or a minute, tops. And you know, a rather substantial percentage of the people who go through the line to get into a criminal courthouse are people out on bail, some of whom are actual dangerous criminals. And a lot of the others are people who are witnesses to crimes whose presence is not exactly welcomed by the criminal element. Honestly, this new TSA genital-feeling stuff goes further than I’ve ever had to go through to even go into a *prison.* They cavity search prisoners for drugs and weapons, of course, but lawyers and other visitors? Not in my experience. Not in this northeastern state. Not unless they’re pretty damn sure you’re carrying contraband. And we’ve had, what, 3 attempted bombing incidents post-9/11? Out of how many scheduled flights? I just did the math. Over 150 *million* worldwide. That’s one attempt per 50 million flights.

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Minnesota Supreme Court quickly shoots down one of Republican Tom Emmer’s legal gambits in the governor’s race recount.

A reassuring report: the folks in charge of driving nuclear weapons around the country have apparently been getting busted for public intoxication, bar fights and more while they’re on the job.

Pastor who said parishioners in leadership positions in his Church had to get off of Facebook or quit the Church because being on Facebook was a gateway drug to hooking up with old flames, fornication and all the rest?

Well, seems he knows how to party even without Facebook.

TPM Reader MP writes in: “I confess that your post comes across as a bit schizophrenic to me. Are you saying that people who complain about this are being silly? Do you think the new procedures are ridiculous and unjustified? It’s just not clear.”

He goes on from there. But this seemed like a good opportunity to clarify any misunderstandings about the post. If it seems like I’m not taking a clear position on the pat-downs themselves it’s because I’m not. I’m really not sure what I think of them. Or rather I don’t have a clear idea what our policy should be. Read More

We’ve gotten a flood of responses to my post on the presidency and the power of incumbency. If I can say so, quite a few have written in before reading the whole post. The best critique I think is to ask whether incumbency hasn’t been becoming less important in recent decades. After all, Carter and Bush I were both pretty recent. But TPM Reader MS raises a different point …

You’re on target, but the common denominator that removes squishiness from the Ford/Johnson types and the Carter/Bush types -at least in the “modern” era, say, post-1960, when the democratization of the nominating process really began, is whether the incumbent gets a primary challenger. Johnson had McCarthy; Ford had Reagan; Carter had Kennedy; Bush had Buchanan. Nominating contests split and demoralize parties and reveal political weakness for the incumbent. So the White House should be working to ensure nobody primaries Obama.

An interesting question, of course, is who would be tempted to? Somebody from the left, obviously. Feingold, Kucinich? Others?

In most respects, I think that we’re talking about a confusion of causes and effects. Presidents who are politically wounded and/or leading fractured coalitions get primaried. Which is another way of stating that getting primaried is a symptom of weakness, not a cause. But these things can catalyze each other and cause and effect in the political world isn’t always so clear cut. But yes, if I were Obama, I’d be watching this front very closely.

David B. Sparks, a political science Ph.D candidate at Duke, put together the following animation showing the red-blue divide as it has evolved in presidential elections from 1920-2008: Read More

I was just reading this article about Mike Huckabee saying that President Obama’s going to be harder to beat than a lot of Republicans think. I think he’s right, for a number of reasons. But one he mentions is incumbency. And he’s right. People simply don’t appreciate how seldom elected presidents get denied reelection. By my count, it’s only happened three times in the last century. Carter, the first President Bush and Herbert Hoover. (If you come up with someone I’m missing I’ll be terribly embarrassed. But please let me know.) Read More