Over the last few months we’ve seen a steady and by any historical standard rapid Republican withdrawal from the politics of immigrant-bashing. First, the elites in the party, then the would-be presidentials and then last week basically all the hold outs among the Tea Partiers in the House. In military terms, it’s not so much a rout as the army just fading away.
I think that’s great for the country. But it does make you wonder, what happened to this being a core issue to GOP base voters last year? Read More
A series of gorgeous pics of the rapidly changing polar regions, via NASA’s IceBridge aerial survey mission.
Last we heard from members of the White Student Union at Towson University they were speaking up for disenfranchised white voters at CPAC. Well, now they’re back, starting up nighttime campus patrols. Read More
Later this week, President Obama will sign a bill that simultaneously averts a government shutdown and locks sequestration into law for the next six months.
During those six months, Obama will try to build a coalition of Democrats and Republicans who can agree to a mix of new taxes and entitlement cuts to replace sequestration. At the same time Republican leaders will grapple with the need to increase the debt limit, and there’s a small chance that these two imperatives will become entwined in a sort of 2011 redux. But ever since GOP leaders relinquished their dangerous and heavy-handed debt ceiling strategy earlier this year, and then resigned themselves to enduring sequestration rather than raise taxes again, it makes more sense that Republicans will increase the debt limit without demanding any real concessions, and sequestration will continue in perpetuity. Maybe its spending caps will simply become the new discretionary spending baseline, and just like that an era of perpetual crisis will come to an end.
That’s a disorienting forecast. Read More
As we head into tomorrow’s Supreme Court hearing on Prop 8, check out the map.
A bit earlier we flagged this sort of weird story where Georgia (the US state of Georgia in case John McCain gets any bright ideas) is making a claim on a tiny sliver of Tennessee. And as usually happens, when we dip into a new story at least one reader writes in who understands the issue in great detail. In this case it’s TPM Reader JM …
Some background might be helpful for this Georgia goes to war with Tennessee thing. As a Georgia resident and someone who has been involved behind the scenes with this resolution’s crafting and advancement, what looks far-fetched at a glance is actually surprisingly substantive when examined. I’ve tacked on the official white paper that details this in much better depth but – speaking as someone who was very skeptical at first – I honestly can suggest there is a concrete legal argument buried in there.
Fresh on the heels of war threats from Georgia the Tennessee state legislature was gripped yesterday in a Sharia scare over a feared Muslim foot washing sink.
TPM Reporter Sahil Kapur caught up with Rob Reiner and former RNC chair Ken Mehlman waiting in line outside the Court this morning for today’s oral arguments and filed this quick report …
I just caught up with Rob Reiner and former RNC chair Ken Mehlman, both strong marriage equality supporters, at the front of the line before Supreme Court arguments on Prop 8.
“I’m looking forward to a great argument by Ted Olson who I know has done this many, many times and we feel really confident that he’s going to hit on all the points we need him to hit on, Reiner said. As for the national change in public opinion, he said, “The winds are starting to shift.”
Unless this historically conservative Supreme Court pulls off a shocker and finds a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, we seem almost certainly headed toward a series of state-by-state skirmishes over the issue, which creates its own set of political risks and rewards.
While the speed with which public opinion has shifted on the issue is remarkable and the momentum (to extent there is such as thing as momentum in politics) seems to be on the side of gay rights advocates, a Supreme Court decision to kick the matter to the states essentially preserves the status quo. As you can see from this map, the status quo isn’t that great if you’re a non-coastal gay couple: Read More