The House GOP backed down big time tonight in this silly fight over whether to defund DHS as a protest of Obama’s immigration moves. Sahil Kapur has the details on what is looking like a very toothless shutdown threat.
Scott Walker at CPAC: Islamic State? Pfft, I already took on union protestors.
I’m going to be leading a live chat with Aurin Squire on tomorrow at 2 PM at The Hive (sub req). Aurin has written a number of pieces for us in the last few months. This piece on black and hispanic police officers in the post-Ferguson era, this piece on the hidden women of Black History of Month and just this last week this piece on the end of black respectability politics.
Get your questions in now and join us on Friday at 2 PM.
There’s some important background on this new intrusion of the Iraq War into the current debate about Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli election. It’s true that like a number of Senate Democrats, John Kerry voted for the Iraq War resolution in late 2002. That was due to a mix of belief in national unity, political cowardice and a credulous assumption that President Bush was actually on the level when he said he needed the authorization to wage war to avoid it, to get inspectors back into Iraq. It was or should have been clear that this was not true, that inspectors and Weapons of Mass Destruction were not the goal that made the threat of war necessary. They were cudgels and covers to help make the war a fait accompli.
Kerry: “The prime minister was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush. We all know what happened with that decision.”
As you can see here, Prime Minister Netanyahu has doubled down on attacking President Obama and European leaders for allegedly ‘giving up’ on efforts to stop Iranian from acquiring nuclear warheads. But in the course of his scorched earth campaign for reelection, he’s done something as yet little noticed in the US. He’s run a campaign ad which not only hugely distorts history but also managed to libel the US.
I wanted to give you a quick update on the Israeli election.
As I’ve noted earlier, not long after the election was called and the Labor Party announced a union with Tzipi Livni as the ‘Zionist Camp’, the Zionist Camp moved into a thin but durable lead over Netanyahu’s Likud party. That changed last month – seemingly tied to a flare up of violence in the north, though many also pointed to a listless Labor/Zionist Camp campaign. But over the last week or so there seems to have been a shift back to the Zionist Camp.
Earlier today we posted a little item about how CPAC had apparently used a picture of Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) on the bio page of Dr. Ben Carson. Both men are African-American. Not a huge thing, not a huge story – but a bit awkward and worth noting. But then things got a little weird.
Our student-indebted correspondent reports on the latest, radical step to solve the student debt crisis and finds it heart-rending but still not the answer.