We begin today's roundup with
Dana Milbank at The Washington Post, who examines the GOP's minority outreach strategy:
[RNC chairman] Priebus redoubled the party’s efforts to reach minorities after the 2012 election, in which President Obama took 93 percent of the black vote. If the party doesn’t improve its standing with racial minorities, particularly with the fast-growing Latino population, it will gradually become irrelevant — a topic that came up at Monday’s lunch. [... Here’s one problem: The panelists saw fit to praise the contributions of the late Lee Atwater, the Republican operative who made Willie Horton a household name in the racially tinged 1988 campaign.
At Salon,
Sean Illing takes on the lie about running the government like a business:
First, America isn’t a business. Businesses exist to turn a profit, to create wealth for shareholders; that’s their only reason for being. Countries exist to preserve a cultural identity, a way of life, of which the economy is a part. Conservatives often argue that this is an abstract distinction; that, practically speaking, overseeing a corporation and deciding national economic policy are fundamentally the same. [...]
Business acumen is a terrible indicator of political ability, and for obvious reasons. Business and politics are separate spheres; they require different skill sets. CEOs are despots; they don’t persuade so much as dictate and they’re more inclined to fire those with whom they disagree. Presidents live in a non-zero-sum context, where cooperation is crucial and consensus is critical. Good presidents also tend to care about different things than successful CEOs. The only metric that matters in private industry is profit; this attracts a certain kind of person and cultivates a certain kind of disposition. There are no rewards for compassion and empathy in the corporate world. But compassion and empathy are precisely what we need in a president.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Ryan Cooper argues that we need more stimulus and growth-oriented programs, not less:
The upshot here is that there is no credible reason (no, not even financial stability) for the Fed not to try everything in its power to restore employment and growth. Even today, seven years after the financial crisis, unemployment is high, inflation is low, and growth has been weak at best. But instead of vigorously trying to put the nation back to work, the Fed has been extremely eager to withdraw stimulus, only to be forced back into it repeatedly when the recovery's strength flags.
I dubbed this pattern "premature extraculation," and it seems hopeless that the Fed will ever see sense. This despite the fact that we are about due for another recession, which is undoubtedly being cooked up in a grifting financial parasite, I mean, large bank right now. Postwar economic expansions have lasted an average of 58 months; this one is currently at 72 months and counting. Wall Street has largely returned to the size and profitability of the pre-crisis years. Another asset bubble is coming, sooner or later.
Marlow Stern at The Week looks at Fox News and transphobia:
when the news broke Monday morning of the ex-Olympian formerly known as Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn—courtesy of a stunning, glamorous Vanity Fair cover shot by famed lenser Annie Liebovitz—the pessimists among us were nervously anticipating which mainstream media outlet (or big-name celeb) would blurt out something incredibly stupid.
The house money was, of course, on Fox News. And lo and behold, one of Rupert Murdoch’s bloviating buffoons won the idiot sweepstakes.
Fox Business anchor Neil Cavuto couldn’t help himself, cracking a series of offensive transphobic jokes on the program Monday. First, he introduced the Jenner segment by yelling in an exaggerated voice, “What the HELL is going on?!” Then the other anchor on the program, Dagen McDowell, tried to one-up Cavuto by using male pronouns to identify Caitlyn a total of seven times. If that weren’t enough, Cavuto joked about ending the segment early due to his clear distaste for the subject, referred to his next guest Charles Payne as “Charlene Payne,” and then wrapped the segment by branding Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover and transition the end of American civilization: “Rome, final days. But that’s fine,” he said.
Will Bunch takes a look at Lindsay Graham's declaration of his 2016 bid and the rest of the GOP field:
Graham never met a war he didn't like, and it's not clear if he wants to be the next POTUS or commissioner of the Thought Police. He once said famously: "If I'm president of the United States and you're thinking about joining Al Qaeda or ISIL, I'm not gonna call a judge. I'm gonna call a drone and we will kill you." That's the kind of thing that won't get you to 1600 Pennsylvania Aveneue. but it may net Graham a few votes in Iowa or his home base, the Palmetto State.
And that kind of thing is a big problem for the GOP. With a looming vacancy in the Oval Office, there's little incentive for any and all manner of Republicans not to throw his or her hat into the ring. After all, running for president is a kind of fun job if you're on any kind of ego trip -- when you know that a lucrative gig as a lobbyist (look at how much blackmail cash Denny Hastert earned in such a short time) or a Fox News commentator is guaranteed on the other side. The Republicans will have anywhere from a dozen to maybe 19 candidates in the early primaries -- yet none has more than 12-13 percent in the early polls.
Stephanie Grace looks at the fall of Bobby Jindal's "rising star":
Jindal, a hard-charging former Rhodes Scholar, has always nursed grander ambitions, and voters generally gave him a pass. That was when things were going well.
These days they’re not, and Jindal’s focus on the upcoming presidential primaries has taken a toll back home. While he was popular and powerful enough to avoid a reelection fight in 2011, by 2015 his approval rating had sunk to 27 percent, according to one poll; a friendly survey by his own consulting firm pegged the number at 46 percent, hardly a resounding vote of confidence. [...] More than any of that, his constituents are frustrated that their governor can’t be bothered to do his day job—and when he does, that his actions are often transparently designed to build a national profile rather than meet Louisiana’s needs.
On a final note,
The New York Times gives its opinion on the Supreme Court's 8-1 decision regarding online threats:
If the government wants to criminally prosecute someone for his or her words, the court ruled, it must do more than show that a reasonable person would have interpreted those words as threats.
“Wrongdoing must be conscious to be criminal,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote for a seven-member majority. In the age of the Internet, when anyone can post anything for the world to see, it was an important affirmation of the need to protect speech, and to require the government to meet a stricter legal standard when trying to punish people for their words alone.