In case you didn’t get a chance to read it yesterday, don’t miss Sahil Kapur’s sum-up of the new Obamacare ‘setback’ that topped the news yesterday. Upshot: don’t believe the hype, a relatively minor delay of one part of a massive piece of legislation that helps huge numbers of people. Meanwhile, the irreplaceable Jon Cohn summarizes the political attack from the right quite nicely. “In other words, Obamacare critics aren’t hyping this news because they wish consumer protections for the sick would take effect now. They’re hyping the news because they wish consumer protections for the sick would go away forever.”
Cable news speculates about two very important political races.
San Diego ‘Hooters’ restaurant says it will no longer serve Mayor Bob Filner because “women should be treated with respect.” Basically when a business based on ogling and being semi-inappropriate to women on the job bans you, you’ve really kind of hit a low.
This is only one poll. But if Bill de Blasio does win the New York City Mayor’s race I think it could be a pretty big moment for progressive politics nationwide, though that may not be clear at first.
TPM Reader RK gives us the anti-Lead maximalism argument on murder rates …
I am a sociologist who studies segregation and urban neighborhood boundaries, so I have some background with the issues of crime, murder, and American politics. Thank you for bringing it up in a very interesting and thought provoking way.
I’ve followed your pieces on the lead theory and the role of American violence with interest. I agree that the lead theory is likely a key piece of the puzzle, but one of the problems I have with that theory is that it takes from some scientific evidence and correlations the whole of a far more complicated issue.
Teenager running to be Mayor of small Utah town says he really didn’t plan on going through with that Columbine style plot to blow up his school which landed him in juvenile detention.
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.