From Campaign Zero: Integrating recommendations from communities, research organizations and the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, these policies aim to protect and preserve life.
Molly Weasley has a recommended diary reviewing the above, from
Campaign Zero.
Chicago Tribune:
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has long had an outsized reputation for clout and effectiveness. Lawmakers jockey to speak at its events, seek its backing and woo its members for campaign contributions.
Now AIPAC, the most prominent pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., is rapidly losing ground in its biggest test as it mounts an all-out campaign to kill President Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran.
The effort to stop the Iran agreement pits it not only against the president but also a swath of the American Jewish community. While AIPAC is on the same side as Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Republicans who are taking on the Democratic president, American Jews voted more than 2-to-1 for Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012.
This debate "is treacherous because it exposes too much of the leadership of the Jewish community as being out of step" with the majority of Jews, Robert Wexler, a Jewish former Democratic congressman from Florida, said in an interview.
AIPAC's effort looks increasingly likely to come up short.
The iran deal and Obamacare will stand as two enormous legacy items for Obama. As Trump would say, yuuuuge.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Josh Marshall:
Let me share with you a deep truth: The nuclear stuff is complicated. Einstein said that. It doesn't necessarily work in the way your everyday life experience would suggest. So it's important to consult the people who know about the nuclear stuff, people called scientists. Particularly, nuclear scientists. And here we have another case where tendentious malefactors leak seemingly damning details to reporters who in the most basic sense do not know what they are talking about and write a story which can and often does dramatically affect the public debate over a critical issue. It's already happened with the 24 days nonsense and it may with this. The AP has to scrub its story and pull a New York Times pretending the gist somehow isn't changed when there is barely a story there in the first place. It really is a replay of how reporters — often acting in good faith — get played by malicious leaks. There are lots of reporters unfortunately who are in on the scam but they shall remain nameless for the moment. And it's all a replay of the tragic nonsense parade which preceded the Iraq War — with lots of the same easy-mark reporters.
Again, basic premise: The nuclear stuff is complicated. The nuclear scientists understand it better than Hannity or even Wolf Blitzer. Listen to the nuclear scientists.
Paul Waldman:
Both parties are drawn to populist appeals, but they come in different variants. The Democratic version tends to be both performative and substantive — they’ll rail against the top one percent, but also offer policy ideas like upper-income tax increases and minimum wage hikes that are intended to serve the interests of regular people. Democratic populism says that the problem is largely about power: who has it, who doesn’t, and on whose behalf it’s wielded.
Republican populism, on the other hand, is aimed against “elites” that are decidedly not economic. It’s the egghead professors, the Hollywood liberals, the government bureaucrats whom they tell their voters to resent and despise. And part of that argument is that despite what those know-it-all experts would have you believe, all our problems have simple and easy solutions. All you need is “common sense” to know how we should reform our health care system, fix the VA, or control undocumented immigration. Understanding how government works isn’t just unnecessary, it’s actually a hindrance to getting things done.
NBC News:
What Mattered
1. The Birthright Citizenship/"Anchor Babies" debate: This has become Exhibit A in how Donald Trump has moved the immigration debate in the GOP presidential race - even for someone like Jeb Bush. It all makes Mitt Romney's "self-deportation" remark in 2012 look tame by comparison, and Democrats believe it will have general-election consequences.
2. Hillary's Combative Presser on Her Emails: The reality for Democrats is that the tough kind of questions Clinton received on Tuesday about her emails won't go away until: 1) if/when the FBI gives her a clean bill of health, and 2) her October testimony before the House Benghazi committee. A lot is riding on what the FBI ultimately decides to do.
3. Jeb vs. Trump: Wednesday night's dueling Jeb Bush-vs.-Donald Trump town halls in New Hampshire highlighted the differences between the two Republicans (and their supporters). If Bush is to regain some political mojo, he'll need to do so by answering Trump's critique of his candidacy - that he's too passive for today's conservative movement.
4. So Much For Those Super PAC Dollars: National Journal's report that Super PACs are being forced to pay nearly 10 times the amount for a single TV ads that actual campaigns do is an important reminder that "hard" campaign dollars are MUCH MORE cost-efficient than Super PAC bucks.
This is for fun, but
read the story and change the dates:
The Donald is trumping his GOP competitors.
The billionaire real estate mogul has taken a rather shocking nine-point lead in a national poll of the hypothetical Republican presidential field, according to a new survey by Public Policy Polling.
Trump leads with 26 percent, followed by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (17 percent), former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (15 percent) and ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (11 percent).
Rounding out the bottom of the list were former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (8 percent), Texas Rep. Ron Paul (5 percent), Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann (4 percent) and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (4 percent).
Trump, whose potential candidacy has for weeks had many pundits snickering, has ridden his loud but debunked concern that President Obama wasn't born in America to the top of the GOP heap.
Matthew Dickinson:
Despite these findings, this won't stop pundits from incorrectly insisting that, "Candidates matter in close campaigns. That goes double for a presidential race which tends to be more dependent on personality and likability than on any sort of policy prescriptions [italics added]." Yes, I understand that it is August – a very slow news month. The president is on vacation. Congress is out of session. The next Republican debate isn't until Sept. 15. Pundits – already naturally predisposed to create the perception of a race where none may exist – are deeply fearful that Clinton, who is trouncing the Democratic field by most metrics, will win this nomination without a real fight. And so why not during a slow news period pounce on the latest polls (never mind that they are not very predictive this early in the contest) to find evidence that Clinton's "lead" is less than we might think and that she is in fact a deeply flawed candidate. So flawed, in fact, that she might as well bow out now! Cue the horse race!
Alas, simply trotting out one more stale variation about the significance of the "beer test" to make the case that Clinton is potentially doomed does not make the reference any more true this election cycle. To a certain extent the same goes for the constant emphasis on Clinton's relatively high unfavorable ratings. While there's some evidence that the favorable/unfavorable ratio is correlated with election outcomes, it's unclear whether these ratings help determine voters' support for or against a candidate, or are a reflection of that support. In any case, it is far too early in the campaign to put much stock in these numbers.
Jeff Greenfield:
As historians begin to assess Barack Obama’s record as president, there’s at least one legacy he’ll leave that will indeed be historic—but not in the way he would have hoped. Even as Democrats look favorably ahead to the presidential landscape of 2016, the strength in the Electoral College belies huge losses across much of the country. In fact, no president in modern times has presided over so disastrous a stretch for his party, at almost every level of politics.
Legacies are often tough to measure. If you want to see just how tricky they can be, consider the campaign to get Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill 178 years after he left the White House. Working class hero? How about slave owner and champion of Native American genocide? Or watch how JFK went from beloved martyr to the man whose imperial overreach entrapped us in Vietnam, and then back to the president whose prudence kept the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning into World War III.
Yet when you move from policy to politics, the task is a lot simpler—just measure the clout of the president’s party when he took office and when he left it. By that measure, Obama’s six years have been terrible.