The news that the CIA and allied intelligence agencies disrupted another attempt by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to take down an airliner with a pair of underpants (or, it likely seems, actually infiltrated AQAP and made off with the explosive skivvies before they could be used) has set off a predictable round of teeth-chattering in the cable television class.
The summary? We may not know much — but we do know we stopped another “bad guy.”
How’s Mitt Romney claiming credit for the auto bailout playing with anti-bailout Republicans on Capitol Hill? It’s tricky. Very tricky.
TPM Reader GJ recalls contacting Maurice Sendak about using Where The Wild Things Are images in his high school’s yearbook:
I think your question regarding the generation gap concerning the familiarity of Maurice Sendak confuses two issues: familiarity with the man and familiarity with his work.
I was born in the late 1970s. I most certainly read Where the Wild Things Are as a child. Not only that, while in high school (in the 1990s), our yearbook committee decided to go with a Where the Wild Things Are theme. The yearbook staff wrote to Mr. Sendak to ask him if it was ok to use the book’s imagery. Rather than sending a simple yes or no response back, he mailed the school a set of entirely new and original drawings just for our yearbook! It was amazing.
RNC Hispanic outreach director tweets that she misspoke about Romney not having an immigration policy yet:
I misspoke, Romney’s position on immigration is clear mi.tt/KiMi3x
— Bettina Inclan (@BettinaInclan) May 8, 2012
Ferocious pushback from 20something fans of Maurice Sendak.
Look, former auto czar Steve Rattner isn’t an unbiased observer on the auto bailout. He’s a longtime Dem fundraiser who was directly involved in the bailout (there was also that whole New York state pension fund unpleasantness). I don’t expect Rattner to cut Mitt any slack. But he made one point in our interview with him this morning that bears repeating.
Before we even got to the managed bankruptcy in 2009 that Romney says he called for all along, there were a series of emergency loans in late 2008 to the carmakers from the federal government that Romney opposed. This isn’t a throwaway use of the word “emergency.” Those were do-or-die loans. There was no time to go through a managed bankruptcy then. Those loans are what kept Detroit afloat until a managed bankruptcy. Romney opposed them. If Romney’s position had prevailed, there would have been no emergency loans and no auto industry left to put through a managed bankruptcy.
Former auto czar Steve Rattner reacts to Mitt Romney taking credit for the auto bailout: “I’ve read, I think, everything Romney’s had to say on this subject, and the level of flip flopping and dissembling is truly mindboggling. He’s been on every side of the auto rescue at different times and said different things, so it’s hard to know what he honestly thinks.”
TPM Reader PP is feeling a little curmudgeonly today (and that’s not a bad thing):
Is Romney taking credit for the auto recovery really anyone takes seriously? Besides getting tied up in irritation about what his position really was, the frank facts of history are that it doesn’t matter what his positions were/are/might have been, anymore that it mattered what I or you or most people thought at the time.