CA Tea Partier struggles to get fellow Tea Partiers to turn out to protest women vets event.
Gay service member groups debate whether or not to fill out the Pentagon’s new gays in the military survey, which was just sent out to about 400,000 active duty, guard and reserve members of the military.
Because the enthusiasm gap means you end up with a pool of “likely voters” more than half of whom, according to one new poll, think President Obama’s a socialist.
The Pentagon has lifted its edict banning Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg, from going to Guantanamo to cover the military commissions there. Rosenberg is the leading journalist on the story of Gitmo, military detentions and tribunals, so that’s good news.
The bad news is there doesn’t seem to be any formal resolution to the underlying practice of the Pentagon issuing such a ban in the first place.
On this lazy, enervating Friday morning I wanted to flag your attention to this piece by Bernard Avishai over at TPMCafe. Over the years, as the Israelis and Palestinians prove themselves endlessly incapable of embracing the obvious, there are recurrent calls that the time for a ‘two state’ solution has passed and that now only a ‘one state’ solution is possible. This has always struck me as profoundly crazy. These two people are so angry, intractable, episodically violent to each other and unwilling to compromise that the only solution is to make them all live peacefully together in one pluralistic, compromise-based state. Truly a genius idea. As Avishai notes, the alternative to two states isn’t Belgium it’s Bosnia where you could have a pleasant bloodbath for a decade or so until you came out the other end with two states or something like you have now. In any case, this isn’t so much his point as his premise. And what he does describe are some provocative thoughts on what the two states will eventually look like. Definitely give it a read.
Boehner and Co. get cracking on bringing back the K Street project in the new GOP Capitol Hill.
Let’s face it. The crazy world of politics involves a lot of mock surprise and feigned outrage. But every so often I hear something and can’t help but think: You’re kidding. We’re really talking about this?
I just happened upon this article in the Post about the ‘tanning tax’ in the Health Care Reform law and whether it is unconstitutional because it violates the equal protection rights of white people. In other words, in the era of Obama, who presumably isn’t in great need of an insta-tan, the tax on tanning salons is a grand effort to stick it to whitey.
On the one hand, yeah, I can conjure up some funny scenes of Snooki and The Situation from Jersey Shore marching down the boardwalk singing ‘We Shall Overcome’. But apparently, this is actually being discussed. Rush has been going on about it and a guest host on Glenn Beck’s show said: “I now know the pain of racism.”
It’s part of my professional responsibility to keep up on what’s percolating on the outer fringes of The Crazy and, man, I hadn’t heard about this and did not see it coming.
Now, lest I be misunderstood. The Post doesn’t seem to have much question that the law probably passes constitutional muster.
But still, we’re talking about this?
The latest on the district court ruling ruling certain parts of the DOMA law unconstitutional.
The DOJ just put out a statement detailing the guilty pleas and swap deal over those Russian spies. Statement after the jump. Read More