Visual source: Newseum
My segment on yesterday's Kagro in the Morning radio show:
Non-Flash link
Today's show can be heard here at 9 ET:
The Daily Kos Radio Player
Non-Flash
Nate Silver:
As has often been the case, the two new data points that had the most influence on Tuesday’s forecast contained good and bad news for each candidate. The good news from Mr. Obama’s point of view was a new NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll gave him a 6-point lead in the national horse race. It’s a good number for Mr. Obama — NBC News / Wall Street Journal is a strong pollster that tends to play it straight up the middle.
Still, it’s just one data point from among many, and there just isn’t any evidence that the race is breaking toward either candidate.
Linda Greenhouse:
History may someday settle on one of the competing and contradictory narratives now running rampant within the virtual Beltway to explain the decision by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to save the Affordable Care Act. Since that day seems far off, here in quick summary are the emerging story lines.
In “a singular act of courage,” Chief Justice Roberts took a bullet for the country, Jeffrey Toobin suggests in a New Yorker article that describes the chief justice’s entering the courtroom on the morning of June 28 with eyes “red-rimmed and downcast.” (Was he suffering from the seasonal allergies that plague everyone else in Washington?) Chief Justice Roberts thus exemplifies the “virtue of compromise in an era of Occupiers, Tea Partiers and litmus-testing special interests,” according to David Von Drehle’s admiring Time magazine cover story.
On the other hand, the chief justice is a cynical manipulator who “wanted to maintain the Supreme Court as a playpen for anti-government sophistry” while avoiding trashing up the court altogether, Timothy Noah claims in The New Republic. Can it be that he is fooling us all because “we’ve never really gotten over our collective crush on John Roberts,” an affection both “silly and undeserved,” as Jeff Shesol maintains on Slate?
AP:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he's open to running for president in four years if the job is open.
The first-term Republican says he hopes fellow Republican Mitt Romney beats President Barack Obama in November and seeks re-election in 2016. But if the presidency is open, Christie says he'll "certainly think about it.
"I'm sure Romney will win, but just in case...."
Dana Milbank:
If Romney wants to keep his vow not to cut Social Security and Medicare for those age 55 and older, he’d need to shut down all functions of the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Interior, Justice, Labor and Treasury as well as the National Institutes of Health.
That hardly seems plausible; nobody would be left to collect tax revenue for the Pentagon. So which one will Romney choose: defense spending or tax cuts?
Brooks and Collins on gun control:
David: The unpleasant truth is that the evidence is decidedly mixed. As our colleague Adam Liptak has reported, Justice Stephen Breyer surveyed the vast body of empirical research on the effectiveness of gun control and concluded, “The upshot is a set of studies and counter-studies that, at most, could leave a judge uncertain about the proper policy conclusion.”
In 2005, a group of scholars reviewed the literature on gun control for the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Here’s their conclusion: “Based on identified studies reviewed in this report, the evidence is insufficient to determine whether the Unites States firearm laws affect violence.”
A different study for the Centers for Disease Control two years earlier reached a similar conclusion. This is not an open and shut case.
Gail: I concede your point when it comes to regulation of the right to carry concealed weapons – the evidence isn’t unanimous. There are some parts of the gun control debate that are definitely open to, um, debate. There are parts that aren’t, like the need to ban assault weapons. The fact that Congress found it impossible to extend the law against guns that allow you to shoot off 100 bullets in a couple of minutes is simply insane.
Jonathan Bernstein:
There’s been a fight over the past couple of days about who invented the Internet, played out, of course, on the Internet. It started when Barack Obama mentioned the government’s role in the history of the Internet in his “didn’t build that” speech, which produced a Wall Street Journal column by Gordon Crovitz claiming that, in fact, private business was alone responsible for the creation of the Internet. Which, in turn, produced multiple debunking articles, such as Farhad Manjoo’s “Obama Was Right: The Government Invented the Internet.”
Now, I’m not a tech geek, so I can only go by careful reading to assess who seems to be correct about the actual facts of this, but as far as I can tell it’s the Manjoo side, and it isn’t close.