An old friend of mine, Michael Tisserand, posted this Pete Seeger remembrance on Facebook:
At TPM Cafe Book Club this morning, Amanda Ripley asks South Koreans about Americans’ obsession with their high test scores in an excerpt from The Smartest Kids In The World: “When I asked if [Korea’s education minister, Lee Ju-Ho] agreed with President Obama’s glowing rhetoric about the Korean education system, he smiled a tired smile. It’s a question he got asked often, usually by Korean reporters who could not understand what the U.S. president—or anyone—would find to like about Korea’s system.”
TPM Prime members should remember to join us for a chat with Ripley this Friday at noon.
Time to heave ho, argues Ed Kilgore, “As the State of the Union Address and the first partisan blows of the 2014 election cycle approach, there’s a familiar character missing from the political state: the Deficit Boogeyman.”
The new GOP alternative to Obamacare shows why Republicans have refrained from offering a concrete plan for so long: health care policy is complex and requires hard choices that result in uneasy compromises. But even still, is targeting employer-based insurance for disruption really what Republicans want to do?
I’m sure many of our readers have memories of marching, performing, or working with Pete Seeger. Do you have a particularly striking remembrance? Please email it to us at the “Send Comments and News Tips” address at the top of the page.
It sounds like Tom Perkins got a talking to by the ADL (“pleasant discussion with Abe Foxman”, in his words) and now he’s apologizing for his “Kristallnacht” usage. I have the video of Perkins comments after the jump. What’s interesting, though, is what he’s apologizing for. It’s sort of narrowly about offending Jews or just being awful in comparing anything happening in the US to what happened under the Third Reich and the Holocaust.
But basically, he still thinks his message was right. Just poorly worded. Just that one word. “As a messenger I’ve been shot, but read the message.” Watch it. It’s slightly endearing, kind of weird and awkward at times. Clearly, this is a guy who’s not used to being at the center of a media firestorm. There’s much less of the shock of the horrible comparison but no less of the cluelessness, and self-awareness gap that made his letter to the editor so memorable.
Venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who is under fire for comparing the attack on America’s rich to “Kristallnacht,” was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in France in 1996 for killing someone — with his yacht.
It apparently doesn’t get much worse than the U.S. Army, according to jokes surfaced by the Washington Post from emails commanders sent to one another. Brigadier General Martin P. Schweitzer, at the time a colonel, wrote in an email to a colleague that he had masturbated “3 times over the past 2 hours” after a meeting with Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC). Ick.
Just another bizarre example of New Jersey politics and how this investigation into BridgeGate is going. State Sen. Kevin O’Toole will remain on the investigating committee even though it appears that David Wildstein, the guy at the center of the scandal, was consulting with him about what to do during the cover-up phase of the scandal.
New Jersey lawmakers had a chance today to purge a Republican state senator from investigating the bridge scandal after questions were raised about whether he was involved in the scandal itself. So what did they do?