Weatherman nails pronouncing Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
You try it.
Politico:
In a bid to head off a Democratic filibuster, AIPAC — the powerful pro-Israel group — is frantically lobbying Senate Democrats to allow an up-or-down vote on a resolution disapproving of the Iran nuclear deal.
But Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and other top Democrats believe the 42 Senate Democrats who have come out in favor of the Iran accord will hold firm and prevent the resolution from ever being taken up on the floor.
The Hill:
House Republicans are changing course to take up a last-minute plan to oppose the Iran nuclear deal following a revolt from some of the conference’s conservative members.
Instead of a single vote to disapprove the deal, the House will now hold three separate votes on the agreement.
One would be a resolution to approve the deal — which is sure to fail and, in the process, force many Democrats to break with the White House.
The second would be to express a sense of the House that the Obama administration has not met the requirements of the Iran review legislation by failing to give lawmakers the text of separate agreements between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Those bilateral side deals, which concern the details of inspections at some Iranian sites, are at the center of the House’s uprising over the Iran pact
Finally, the House would vote to prevent the U.S. from lifting sanctions on Iran as part of complying with the nuclear deal.
The House is still expected to finish votes regarding Iran on Friday, which is the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.
Greg Sargent:
The basic idea, which House conservatives are acknowledging very frankly, is that now that it’s obvious Congress can no longer block the Iran deal, a legal push to get more details of it revealed could conceivably divulge more damaging information about it, thus getting Congressional Democrats to pull their support.
Balderdash. They're losing badly and are desperately searching for something — anything — to protect themselves form an angry populist base. 20 points to Gryffindor and -20 points to Slytherin.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Shane Goldmacher:
The contrasts were stark.
She spoke inside a windowless think tank auditorium, from a podium and with a teleprompter. Chilled water and a conversation in upholstered chairs awaited nearby. Her address was substantive, serious and staid. “Is it perfect? Well, of course not. No agreement like this ever is,” she said of the Iran deal. “But is it a strong agreement? Yes it is.”
He spoke in the beating midday heat before a raucous, tea party-organized rally of more than 1,000 at the foot of the Capitol. He flashed a thumbs up as supporters screamed “Donald!” and waved pro-Trump signs. “Never ever, ever in my life have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated as our deal with Iran,” he said. “And I mean never.”
This was Clinton in her element, and Trump in his. She offered a detailed policy defense of the Iran deal. He inveighed against it with insults.
She lectured. He hectored.
“Diplomacy is not the pursuit of perfection. It is the balancing of risk.” Clinton explained.
“We are led by very, very stupid people,” said Trump. “Very, very stupid people. We cannot let it continue.”
Nate Cohn:
It is tempting to look at Mr. Trump’s resilience thus far and conclude that he can defy any effort to bring him down. But the party has not yet played its full hand, or anything like it. So far, Mr. Trump has fended off a few attacks from a disorganized party at a time when voters are paying relatively little attention. That will change.
My colleague Nick Confessore reported that Republican groups are mulling waging a large campaign against Mr. Trump. But that effort has struggled, in part because attacking him brings risks, and every group argues that someone else ought to do the work of taking him down. It’s a textbook collective action problem.
It would be easier if the party had already coalesced around a single candidate. “I think 2016 was already particularly challenging without Trump,” said Hans Noel, another of the book’s authors. The G.O.P. has struggled to coalesce behind anything like a consensus candidate because the party is so fractured and the field is so big.
Seth Masket:
Donald Trump's presidential candidacy has been in the news (and, relatedly, atop the polls) for a while now — a good deal longer than most political observers expected it would be. As such, it's invited a great deal of analysis about What It Means. Do Trump's successes so far mean that voters no longer value experience? That they're pushing back against the GOP's post-2012 "political correctness"? That the party system is unraveling and Trump has tapped into a post-partisan silent majority? That it's time to start thinking about his vice presidential candidate? That the parties need to address Trump's policy stances to survive?
No. On all of the above. Here's why.
Brian Beutler on the Dr Frankenstein behind the creation of the Trump monster:
Writing for National Review, Jonah Goldberg and Charles C.W. Cooke have each diagnosed Trumpism as a failing of the conservative voters who comprise Trump’s base.
Cooke believes that Trump “has succeeded in convincing conservatives to discard their principles,” begging the question of whether Trump’s supporters ever really shared the principles that animate conservative organizations and National Review writers. Goldberg insisted that “no movement that embraces Trump can call itself conservative,” which helped give rise to #NRORevolt, an online backlash, thick with white nationalists and other conservatives who are fed up with elites who try to write non-conformists—from moderates to protectionists to isolationists to outright racists—out of the movement.
The anti-tax group Club for Growth is a big part of that purification apparatus. It is currently organizing and raising money for an effort to excise Trump before his view that hedge fund managers should pay their fair share in taxes metastasizes through the Republican primary field.
Republican consultant Steve Schmidt, who presumably sympathizes with National Review and Club for Growth, described their frustrations as the result of a fatal disjunction between mass conservatism and the ideology that’s supposed to underlie it. “We’re at this moment in time,” Schmidt told NPR recently, “when there’s a severability between conservatism and issues. Conservatism is now expressed as an emotional sentiment. That sentiment is contempt and anger.”
This explains Trump’s rise and persistence, but fails to account for how “contempt and anger” became such valuable currency in Republican politics today. That omission is predictable, because such an accounting would implicate nearly everyone who now claims to be astonished and dismayed by the Trump phenomenon.
It’s difficult to pinpoint when resentment became a controlling force in Republican politics, but Club for Growth, National Review, and Schmidt all contributed to it.
Matthew Dickinson:
The Sunday talks shows and other news outlets were abuzz last weekend reacting to the most recent polls showing Donald Trump continuing to lead all Republican candidates in Iowa, site of the first-in-the-nation caucus, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders closing the gap on the Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in that state. In an effort to explain what they see as the two candidates' unexpected staying power, many journalists interpreted these latest results as further evidence that Trump and Sanders are similar "antiestablishment" candidates who are riding a wave of populist support rooted in voters' anger at the political status quo.
As one pundit put it, both candidates are attracting support from "the orphaned vote" consisting of people who don't feel represented by the political ruling class. Some pundits go further to argue that the candidates actually share similar issue positions: Both favor some restrictions on immigration, both oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership and both have a history of supporting Second Amendment gun rights and single-payer health care. Some have even noted similarities in the personal lives, citing everything from their multiple marriages to their distinct hairstyles. (One wag speculates, tongue-in-cheek, that they are in fact the same person!)
Alas, however appealing this media frame may seem, it presents an overly simplified and thus misleading caricature of what are in fact two quite distinct candidacies. To begin, despite his long-standing criticism of the "ruling class," Sanders is a professional politician who is very much part of the political establishment. He's held elective office for more than three decades, including almost 25 years serving in the House and then the Senate. Trump, in contrast, is a political neophyte, who has long toyed with the idea of running for office but until this year never carried through with the threat.
Jill Lawrence:
The mounting refugee crisis has given new fuel to critics all over. Blame Europe, which is only now trying to come up with a coherent policy. Blame the Gulf nations that are accepting few if any refugees, though the crisis and threats are in their region. Blame "the whole world," in the words of Tima Kurdi, aunt of the drowned toddler, who had hoped to bring her brothers and their families to Canada.
And, of course, blame America and President Barack Obama. He is failing. America is failing. Everything is his fault and our fault. The question from the left and the right is the same: Where is the leadership?
But sometimes leadership lies in the roads not taken. For instance, not plunging into the Syrian morass.
Alan Wolfe:
How the GOP’s Religious Freedom Rhetoric Could Undermine the Party
If conservatives want to insist on the priority of rights, they shouldn't be surprised when they see their other goals slipping away.