No sooner did the White House leak details of its new(ish) corporate tax reform plan than John Boehner and Mitch McConnell very publicly trashed it, which led to a familiar and predictable dust up wherein Democrats condemned Republicans for reflexively opposing things President Obama supports and Republicans complained (apparently falsely) that the White House didn’t contact them about the plan before promoting it in the press.

These are all key ingredients for substance-free paint by numbers news stories about Washington dysfunction, or picayune laments that the proposal has nothing to do with the deficit. Tastes vary.

But so long as we’re approaching this story from a political rather than substantive vantage point, I’d just say all of the point-scoring going on between the White House and GOP leaders is a big distraction. Read More

In the latest twist of Virginia Gov. McDonnell’s sugar daddy scandal, the Governor is now blaming the latest revelation on his wife.

I just wanted to note a few comments from Pope Francis yesterday, though you may have heard at least some of it.

Perhaps most strikingly, he said on the subject of gay priests and presumably gays in general: “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Read More

Last we heard from San Diego Mayor Bob Filner he had prompted no fewer than seven women to come forward to allege various forms of harassment ranging from unwanted advances to borderline assault. At the end of last week, Filner took off for a quickie two-week psychological fix up at an undisclosed rehab facility to help him stop harassing women. But now he’s asking the City of San Diego to pick up his legal expenses for the sexual harassment filed by Irene McCormack, his former Communications Director. Read More

Tony Bennett is currently the Florida Education Commissioner. Before that, however, he had the same job in Indiana. He developed a no nonsense reputation supporting charter schools and vouchers and pledging to hold failing or substandard schools accountable. But when the Charter School run a Republican mega-donor, Christel DeHaan, came up with an embarasing grade of a C on Bennett’s A-F system, he and his scrambled to find a way to make that C turn into an A. Here’s the story.

As you saw, Anthony Weiner dropped like a stone in the latest Quinnipiac poll. He fell from a 1st place 26% to a 4th place 16%. But I wanted to flag what I think is the more interesting detail in the poll. Read More

So it turns out that Fox woman interviewing Reza Aslan is their religion correspondent!

Anthony Weiner’s 10-point drop in the latest poll of the New York mayor’s race bumps him from first place down to fourth.

You saw that jaw-dropping Fox interview with Reza Aslan. One little extra nugget on that: the interviewer, Lauren Green, isn’t just your average Fox News interviewer dingbat – she’s actually their ‘religion correspondent’. Now here’s Aslan commenting on just what he thought was going to happen when he showed up on Fox. Short version: he pretty much knew what to expect.

But flipping around Twitter a few moments ago, I noticed that the right-wing blogs are all giddy about supposedly catching Aslan misrepresenting his academic credentials. So they’ve got him, and all that. Read More

I’m a bit late to this. But man, if you haven’t seen this, this is beyond amazing. It’s an interview with Reza Aslan, a religion scholar, with expertise on the New Testament, who also happens to be a Muslim. But, well, he went on Fox News. I don’t know what else to say about this. You must watch this. It will … well, just watch. Read More