Remember when some people wanted to amend Constitution so Schwarzenegger could become President? That was pretty funny.
— @NathanWurtzel
Mother Jones:
In other words, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit for Texas lawmakers to tackle to prevent future Wests. And yet, in the wake of the explosion, the state of Texas has taken exactly one concrete step to prevent future disasters from happening: It created a website that allows people to determine if there's a chemical plant in their neighborhood. That's information that should certainly be available to the public, but it shouldn't be confused with a step that's making those plants safer.
Jamelle Bouie:
Between the ongoing debate over the National Security Agency’s internet surveillance program, the decisions at the Supreme Court and events abroad, the trio of “scandals” that struck the administration two months ago have fallen to the wayside. That includes the controversy at the Internal Revenue Service, where IRS employees were accused of specifically targeting conservative groups for increase scrutiny over applications for tax-exempt status. Despite widespread evidence this wasn’t politically motivated — as well as signs it may have been justified — Republicans have continued to hold the controversy up as an example of government overreach and “Nixonian” behavior from the Obama White House (which, as of this writing, has not been implicated in the scandal).
That should be the end of it, but of course, the GOP is not reality based. They include birthers, nutjobs and other whackos who can't let this go. And that's the elected officials. Their base is even worse. The media, otoh, owe it to their audience to be clear about the nonsense.
Anchorage Daily News editorial:
Is it [background checks] a comprehensive solution? No. [Mark] Kelly agrees that more needs to be done for mental health treatment, education about gun safety and enforcing current laws. And he knows that expanded background checks won't stop sales from the trunk of a car, and that in a country that counts its firearms in the hundreds of millions bad actors will be able to find one.
But expanded checks will stop some sales, will slow down individuals with bad intent and will send a message that Americans can both protect their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and impose sensible safeguards on the trade in firearms.
[Gabby] Giffords and Kelly are pursuing the path of reason. Some of their foes have taken to fear-mongering, crying that any attempt at more gun laws is just the first step to registration and confiscation.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Charles Krauthammer:
For the sake of argument, nonetheless, let’s concede that global warming is precisely what Obama thinks it is. Then answer this: What in God’s name is his massive new regulatory and spending program — which begins with a war on coal and ends with billions in more subsidies for new Solyndras — going to do about it?
Does anyone still pay attention to Krauthammer? Why? His track record is that he's wrong about everything.
Huffington Post:
The divide exposes fault lines in an already divisive [Georgia GOP] primary that some party figures worry could set up a repeat of 2012 losses in Missouri and Indiana, GOP-leaning states where Democrats successfully cast Republican Senate nominees as out of the mainstream based mostly on their views on abortion.
Broun, a conservative who has called President Barack Obama a Marxist and who drew national attention last year when he declared evolutionary theory "lies from the pit of hell," defends his outlier vote – just six Republicans voted against the bill – because the proposal contains exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape or incest.
Jack Shafer defends tabloid tv.
Ed Kilgore doesn't defend David Brooks:
What’s weird about Brooks’ very categorical dismissal of the possibility of a democratic system accommodating Islamists is what his definitions imply for politics right here at home. Can we think of some Americans who view secular, rational thinking as contrary to God’s Will? Who seem to be in an extended revolt against modernity? Who have a fixed, rigid notion of how society ought to operate, rooted deeply in an imagined Golden Age? Who want to utilize democratic processes to impose a system that brooks no compromise or “relativistic” adjustments to changing circumstances, but instead reflects an order dictated by natural and divine law, and the nation’s “true” character?
It’s possible Brooks is entirely conscious of these parallels but just doesn’t want to spell them out; he is, after all, generally aligned with the Republican Party, despite all his “centrist” positioning. If he’s not playing a subtle game here, though, it’s interesting that he doesn’t seem to grasp that you could pretty easily substitute “Tea Party activists” for “Islamists” in this piece and reach a pretty alarming set of conclusions about the proper limits of American democracy. And much as I dislike the Tea Folk, I’m not willing to define them as “outside the democratic orbit” and thus subject to violent resistance if their extreme elements (i.e., those represented by Rand Paul) happen to win an election.
The Atlantic:
Of the three English-language newspaper websites with the highest readerships, two are British.
The number one spot has been occupied since last January by the Mail Online, an industrial-sized feedbag of celebrity titillation and gossip, with a ComScore rating of 50.2 million monthly unique visitors worldwide for May. Currently in at number two is The New York Times, with 46.2 million. Snapping at its heels is The Guardian: it had 40.9 million last month.
That was before Edward Snowden arrived on the scene. Figures given exclusively to The Atlantic show that -- according to internal analytics -- June 10, the day after Snowden revealed his identity on The Guardian's website, was the biggest traffic day in their history, with an astonishing 6.97 million unique browsers. Within a week of publishing the NSA files, The Guardian website has seen a 41 percent increase in U.S. desktop unique visitors (IP addresses loading the desktop site) and a 66 percent rise in mobile traffic. On June 10, for the first time in the paper's history, their U.S. traffic was higher than their UK traffic.