Overall I think Politico has been doing a really good job of tracking congressional efforts to curb sexual assault in the military, reporting on it even as attention turned to other issues like Syria and pointing out that the military has been dragging its feet on any accountability of this issue for decades.
But man, this story today makes me lose my faith. It includes sentences like this:
Even as the problem of military sexual assault has gotten more attention, there’s been no drop-off in women signing up to serve. In fact, all four branches of the military say they’ve hit their recruitment marks in recent years, with the number of enlisted women holding steady at roughly 15 percent.
Let’s try not to express astonishment at women entering the military despite sexual assault statistics. There are many problems with this framing, but here are just a few:
Cuccinelli finishing out the campaign by bringing in Ron Paul to suggest insurrectionist “nullifcation” strategy against the federal government.
Check out this great discussion at The Hive (sub req) about where Obamacare is one month in. Bumpy roll out? Signs of troubles to come?
At this point, in my role as crisis communications expert, I think Paul just needs to relabel, rebrand the new book as an anthology and put this controversy to rest.
More seriously, there does seem to be an intergenerational issue in the Paul clan with plagiarist and racist staffers continually foisting on their byline things they didn’t write and in many cases who the foisters didn’t write either.
Some astonishing news came out of South Carolina Sunday. And it was good news. According to a new Winthrop poll, 52% of South Carolinians oppose legal recognition of same sex marriages. 39% support. That’s still a thin majority of adults in the state who oppose gay marriage. But, My God … this is South Carolina.
It’s an example of some of the new directions we’re going at TPM, doubling down on but also branching out from our core focus on high-speed, iterative coverage of politics.
This piece “Why Do Poor People ‘Waste’ Money on Luxury Goods?” by Tressie McMillan Cottom, which we published on Friday, has been one of the most popular pieces on TPM in all of 2013. I really recommend it to you.
So in case you were wondering, here’s how the last desperate day of Joe Lhota’s campaign went in our Mayor’s race here in NYC
The truly comical last day of the Lhota campaign …. pic.twitter.com/nqURBvs29D
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 4, 2013
Along the lines of the “Yes, You’re Probably Racist” twitter feed (or is it a website?), I think we need a Primer for Halloween for people who seem developmentally challenged in entering the 21st century. So, is it cool to dress up for Halloween in black face? No, not cool. Is it cool to dress your child up as a member of the Ku Klux Klan? No, that’s not cool anymore. Not sure when it was cool.
By now you’ve probably seen our big piece on Insurance Companies hiding savings and benefits from Obamacare from their customers, sometimes going so far as to hard-sell them on new policies that are actually more expensive than the same policies the same carriers are offering in the exchanges.
But now we want to go deeper.
Speaker Boehner comes out against the ENDA workplace anti-discrimination law, effectively nixing any chance it will get a vote in the House this year or become law before 2015.