For my part, Scott Walker’s attempted walk back of his comments about the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay leaders as having “protected children” is ridiculous on its face. He now claims what he meant was that it protected children from “the political and media discussion about it.” Um. Okay.
I’m confident our readers are sophisticated enough to see that for what it is, part of the broader softening of rhetoric over gay rights from Walker and other elected conservatives, but a softening that is opportunistic, inconsistently applied, disingenuous, and which, in this case, Walker bumbled.
But TPM Reader KR emails to say we’re enabling Walker by not calling him out more forcefully. I yield the floor:
I’ve faced this moral dilemma several times and I’m facing it again. I really want a digital copy of John Cale’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Cale’s version is the real version. The version that made the song immortal is the one recorded by the late Jeff Buckley. But it was Cale’s arrangement of the song that transformed Cohen’s original song, which is magnificent but different. Buckley more or less copied Cale’s arrangement. He slowed it down and made it more lush. But fundamentally it’s Cale’s version. But here’s the thing. It’s not on Spotify. (Fair enough, Spotify is a rip-off for artists). But to buy the Cale version on iTunes you have to buy the full … Scrubs TV Soundtrack! Right, not even a whole album but the indignity of buying the Scrubs soundtrack. It’s really too much. So here I am again, home alone with my thoughts, listening to Cohen and Buckley, unable to buy the Scrubs soundtrack.
Three months ago, David Frum and I had an extensive exchange by email on the merits of the then-only-tentatively-agreed Iran nuclear deal. Here it is.
I confess that I am enjoying listening to Israel’s BS artist Ambassador Ron Dermer – architect of the notorious congressional speech in March and Netanyahu’s entry on behalf of Mitt Romney in the 2012 US presidential campaign – whining on CNN with more BS arguments about the Iran nuclear deal. This man is a toxic force in US-Israeli relations and someone who is and always was an almost comically inappropriate choice for ambassador.
Trump files FEC disclosure filing claiming he is worth “TEN BILLION DOLLARS” in all caps.
We’ve just become aware of this. And we are going to try to find out more and report back to you on it. The State of Texas appears to be trying to do an end run around birth-right citizenship by denying birth certificates to American children born to undocumented immigrants on American soil.
In addition to a straightforward effort to deny constitutional rights, it’s just kind of sick. Refusing to issue kids birth certificates?
I think longtime TPM Reader JB has a lot of this right on the real context of the Iranian nukes deal …
I think the deal with Iran should be interpreted through the lens of the decreasing reliance of the United States on oil from the Middle East. The vast quantities of natural gas and oil in in North America that will permit nearly all of our energy needs to be met at home and allow the significant control of price and supply to be exerted close to home changes importantly our reliance on and control of the world energy market. I think this deal represents the first step of US disentanglement from the machinations of Middle Eastern politics and background control of much of what goes on. Here is my assessment of what is happening, by nation:
United States: We are not as much reliant on middle east oil because of our own stocks and increasing renewables so let’s remove any existential threats from the region so we can be less involved. The major existential threat? Nuclear weapons. With no Iran nukes, there is no regional nuclear arms race. So, we don’t have to police the area nearly as much because we have oil, prices of oil will drop with return of Iranian stocks, and there are no existential threats. We’re just not that into you anymore.
I missed this on the first pass. This kind of thinking used to get into the political debate two or three decades ago. But I haven’t seen it in a while. In an interview with The Daily Caller (full transcript here), Rick Santorum suggested that Scott Walker’s opposition to same-sex marriage may be suspect because he hasn’t gotten his wife to fall into line.
Texas chooses men to monitor possible US military takeover of Texas.