After yesterday’s nothingburger of a hearing, John Boehner asks President Obama to release a State Department email.
I think the best take on this was from Dana Milbank of all people — “They summoned a whistleblower to Capitol Hill, but instead they got a virtuoso storyteller.” A riveting account of a horrific incident which really didn’t tell us stuff we didn’t know before or do what Republicans wanted, which was to suggest bad acts or dereliction on the part of President Obama or Hillary Clinton. About all you could use Hicks’s testimony for is actual oversight aimed at improving security policy going forward.
Not even sure what to say about this. According to the father of Ariel Castro’s former (and now deceased wife), when the two were first a couple Castro “would regularly lock his daughter inside a second-floor apartment.”
‘Obamacare’ has an independent panel with some appointees from Congress. Boehner and McConnell are now saying that since they never supported the bill in the first place they’re going to try to hamstring it by refusing to appoint anyone.
The American Conservative Union – a pretty important group on the right and the folks who put on CPAC – just released a conservative statement in support of immigration reform after a meeting with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). But the list is actually telling by its weakness. Or to be more specific, weak in context: it includes a lot of people you’d definitely expect to support reform and basically no one about whom I would say, “Wow, really interesting that they got her to sign on. Didn’t expect that.” Read More
Your big Obamacare story of the day is that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell won’t recommend commissioners to the Independent Payment Advisory Board — a panel designed to contain Medicare spending — as the law asks them to.
This isn’t a huge surprise given how, er, eager Republicans have been to smooth Obamacare implementation in general. But it’s more revealing, and just as ironic, as their other efforts to break or hinder the law before it takes full effect. Read More
Heritage Foundation immigration expert contributed to white “nationalist” website.
Quite the lede … “When Kathleen Dorsett heard her ex-husband scream in agony in the backyard of her home in 2010, she finished changing their daughter’s diaper knowing that her father was carrying out their plan to kill the man by hitting him in the head with a heavy cable.”
More here.
I’m curious to hear what you think about the New York City Council proposal to let non-citizens vote in municipal elections. To me, it’s definitely a bad idea. That’s not, I hope it’s clear, because I’m anti-immigrant. I’m very pro-reform and pro-legalization. But citizenship itself is a critical thing to me — and I suspect that opinion is shared by many residents and currently undocumented immigrants who are clamoring to get a chance to join the club. Read More
TPM has independently confirmed that Malcolm X’s grandson, Malcolm Shabazz, was killed yesterday in a robbery in Mexico City.