Fareed Zakaria had a column out yesterday dissecting and demolishing New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s argument for opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. I won’t try to duplicate his arguments on the merits. I don’t think I can improve on them. But I have wanted for the last week to address Schumer’s decision.
After first saying that invading Iraq was awesome and then slinking back to ‘if the intelligence hadn’t fooled us’, now Jeb Bush is back to saying that “taking out” Saddam Hussein was a “pretty good deal.” In moments like these, it’s worth wondering, does Jeb want to be President? Are his political skills too rusty to make a run?
But there’s a more revealing prism.
Florida is really shining with this needless obstacle for same-sex couples.
Here’s the deal:
A group of same-sex married couples sued the state of Florida today alleging it was not providing birth certificates for their children that lists both spouses as parents.
In indirect response, the state has now asked a judge in the closed year-old case that overturned the state’s same-sex marriage ban whether it must promulgate a new birth certificate form in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right.
Of course, the answer is yes, they should. And that’s almost certainly what a judge will say. Any reasonable vital statistics office would have just proceeded with the new forms on its own. But perhaps fearing backlash from Gov. Rick Scott (R) or some state legislators, the office is slow-walking the whole thing. Nice work, guys.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a picture that captured the weirdness of Donald Trump’s hair quite like this one. I was thinking of putting in lines like an infographic. But just take a look. (Click the headline of this post to see a larger version of the photo.)
I confess I didn’t know TV legend Norman Lear was still alive. But he’s still kicking — and working — at 93. TPM’s Tierney Sneed interviewed him yesterday about that famous 1972 All In The Family episode on homosexuality which got way under Richard Nixon’s skin. We also have a never-before-seen clip of Lear from a yet-to-be-released documentary as he reacts to hearing Nixon on his secret tapes griping about the show “glorifying homosexuality.” Lear’s take, all these years later, is worth a watch.
From Reader AS on my post about the 24 day inspection timeline in the Iran nuclear deal …
The 24 days is probably more bogus than you said.
Nit picking about the 24 days is sort of like trying to dispute different details of climate change research. Specialists look at all of the details, and come up with an opinion. Critics, who generally don’t know what they’re talking about, find some odd research result, and try to blow it up and use it to spread doubt.
They’re doing exactly the same thing here. Detecting work on nuclear weapons in a country like Iraq is a hard and complicated technical problem. Almost none of the people talking about it in the popular press (or me) understand it at all. But people who do understand it seem to have formed a consensus that the plan in the deal is serious and well designed. It is, by all accounts, the most strict inspection regime ever devised, tighter than anything ever implemented anywhere.
Stanley Aronowitz claims we should be grateful for Trump’s candidacy.
TPM Reader JB captures a significant slice of the story …
Trump’s comments are erratic, but I think at bottom he is very disciplined and always on his message: “I win.” Everything he does and says builds on this same core pitch, which he laid out in his opening campaign speech:
Do you feel like a loser? Well, guess what, you should. You are losing. We are losing. To the Mexicans. To the Chinese. To Iran. To bossy women. To Everybody. It is not morning in America; we suck right now. You suck.