Visual source: Newseum
Glenn Kessler:
More ‘birther’ nonsense from Donald Trump and Sarah Palin
And nonsense is what it is, from nonsense candidates.
Mark Blumenthal on the Donald:
Trump's Polls: A Reality Check
But all three surveys involve relatively small subgroups of Republican identifiers: just 238 interviews for NBC/Wall Street Journal, 344 for Fox and 385 for CNN. Since smaller sample sizes make for larger margins of error, the numbers are going to bounce around.
With that in mind, these results should be treated with caution.
Greg Sargent:
In other words, we don’t know what Obama has in mind. As The Post reports today, “letting others take the lead on complex problems has become a hallmark of the Obama presidency.” But it’s also a hallmark of the Obama presidency for him to step in just when such chatter is at its peak and articulate a vision that, by his lights, represents the best of what others contributed to the debate while he waited in the wings. So we'll see.
The Hill:
After the deal was announced on Friday night, many House Republicans believed only a simple majority of senators would need to vote yes to pass the controversial healthcare and Planned Parenthood amendments. A Senate Democratic leadership aide on Saturday disputed those claims.
UPDATED AT 4:35 p.m: The agreement does call for a 60-vote-threshold, House and Senate staffers said Tuesday afternoon.
Dana Milbank:
The birthers have come back to life.
Donald Trump has soared to the top of the Republican presidential polls, thanks in part to the whimsical candidate’s claim that he has hired investigators to hunt down President Obama’s birth certificate in Hawaii. He’s tied for first place with Mike Huckabee, who has said Obama grew up in Kenya. The fading Sarah Palin, swallowing her earlier disavowal of the birther libel, is now asking questions about where the president was born.
Let’s hope Trump’s gumshoes don’t succeed in locating the secret document, for if they do they will learn the horrible, gruesome truth: Obama was born a moderate. In fact — and I have this straight from the vital records people in Honolulu — he was the bastard child of an unholy union of pragmatism and centrism.
Of course, we don’t really need his birth certificate to know this.
Wow. And all this time I thought he was a Socialist/Marxist/Democrat.
CSM:
Fukushima gets worst crisis rating. But how much radiation has been released?
Based on new estimates of the radiation that has been released, Fukushima now has the worst score on the IAEA's accident rating scale. But much about the reactors, and their future, is still unknown.
Questions raised include
how long officials have been sitting on the data.
Under pressure to explain a lag of weeks in reporting data from the nuclear plant, agencies said they were careful not to reveal unreliable information.
Or any other kind of information.
ScienceInsider (AAAS):
Whew. That's what officials at U.S. science agencies and science lobbyists are saying this morning after learning the details of the weekend agreement between the White House and Congress on funding the government for the rest of 2011. The House of Representatives is expected to vote on the measure tomorrow, followed by the Senate on Thursday.
Added: David Leonhardt:
A trick question: If Congress takes no action in coming years, what will happen to the budget deficit?
It will shrink — and shrink a lot. This simple fact may offer the best hope for deficit reduction.