E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes Harry Reid vs. the Smooth Deal:
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is an acquired taste. It may surprise people outside of his Democratic caucus that many of his colleagues will miss him. But they will. [...]
There is a vogue for admiring Lyndon Johnson’s take-no-prisoners canniness as a legislative leader. But there is actually an unacknowledged tilt in our media and political culture toward politicians who wrap the knives they wield in political battles with velvet. Harry Reid isn’t into velvet, and he doesn’t pander very well to journalists. We like being pandered to, even though we don’t admit it. Reid has no compunction about picking up the phone and issuing a scolding when he dislikes something he sees in print.
But there is a big upside to Reid’s approach, which is candor.
Doyle McManus at the
Los Angeles Times writes
Joe Biden is Democrats' 2016 understudy, in the wings in case Hillary Clinton falters:
Joe Biden still wants to run for president. At least, his friends tell me, a big part of him does. He talks about the prospect readily, whenever reporters or voters ask. He doesn't sound as if the ambition that fired him to run when he was 44 or 64 has diminished at 72. [...]
At this point, the main cheerleader for a Biden presidency is a voluble former South Carolina Democratic Party chairman, Dick Harpootlian, who laid out the rationale for a run to the Washington Post this way: "He ain't got no email problems. He ain't got no foundation problems. What you see with Joe is what you get."
Head below the orange splash for more pundit excerpts.
Patrick Caldwell at Mother Jones writes Forget Elizabeth Warren. Another Female Senator Has a Shot to Fill the Senate's New Power Vacuum:
In the nanoseconds after Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid announced Friday morning that he will give up his leadership post and retire in 2016, liberal groups raced to promote their go-to solution for almost any political problem: Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Much like the movement to draft Warren for president, the idea of putting her in charge of the Democratic caucus was more dream than reality. Warren's office has already said she won't run, and as Vox's Dylan Matthews explains, putting Warren in charge of the Democratic caucus would prevent her from holding her colleagues accountable when they stray too far from progressive ideals.
Instead, Reid's likely replacement is New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who already has endorsements from Reid and Dick Durbin, the outgoing minority leader's No. 2. But lefties have long been wary of Schumer, who, thanks to his home base in New York City, is far more sympathetic to Wall Street than the rest of his caucus. And lost in the Warren hype is another female senator: Washington's Patty Murray.
John Nichols at
The Nation writes
Harry Reid’s Replacement Must Be Progressive and Effective:
The immediate speculation about replacing Reid followed conventional wisdom, with the top prospects identified as New York Senator Charles Schumer and Illinois Senator Dick Durbin. But, within hours, there were reports that Durbin was taking himself out of contention. Thus, any challenge to Schumer was likely to come from a “dark horse” contender—with prominent initial mentions going to Patty Murray of Washington and Michael Bennet of Colorado. [...]
It is not just on foreign policy that Schumer has been disappointing. The New Yorker has cast some lousy votes on trade policy For instance, he supported permanent normalization of trade relations with China, when responsible senators such as Minnesota’s Paul Wellstone and Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold were voting “no.”
Murray’s record is even worse on trade, and it is hard to forget the compromises she made when “negotiating” with then House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan on the “Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013.”
Charles M. Blow at
The New York Times writes
The Beating of Floyd Dent:
Videos like the Dent footage further the perception, especially among African-Americans, that the police are more likely to use force — specifically deadly force — against blacks than whites.
A December CBS News poll found that 84 percent of blacks and 33 percent of whites believe that the police in most communities are more likely to use deadly force against blacks. Just 2 percent of whites, and 0 percent of blacks, believe the police are more likely to use such force against whites.
(Fifty-seven percent of whites and 10 percent of blacks said they thought race did not affect the use of deadly force.)
John Mecklin at
Foreign Policy writes
Disarm and Modernize:
Countries with nuclear weapons have recently embarked on highly ambitious and costly programs, largely unexamined outside national security circles, to renew the strategic and tactical weapons in their arsenals. These projects include both technological upgrades and entirely new systems; as documented by Hans Kristensen and Robert Norris, nuclear-arsenal experts at the Federation of American Scientists, the modernizations run the gamut, from ballistic missiles to bombers, warheads to naval vessels, cruise missiles to even weapons factories. Russia is in the process of phasing out and replacing all its Soviet-era nuclear weapons systems. The proposed U.S. maintenance and modernization program has been projected to cost some $355 billion over the next decade and $1 trillion or more over 30 years. And every nuclear country is following suit.
While these efforts will not necessarily increase the number of deployed warheads in the world, the programs and the enhanced weapons they are projected to produce will last for decades. The race for ever-more nukes has become, instead, a race for ever-better, -sleeker, and -stealthier ones. And these transformations and upgrades, designed to make weapons harder to shoot down and more precise and reliable, ensure that the world will be no less dangerous—and perhaps even more perilous—than it is now.
In terms of sheer numbers, the nuclear arms race of the Cold War may be over. But the worldwide modernization craze scrambles the calculus of nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation efforts, challenging the aging underpinnings of the NPT itself. Approximately 16,000 nuclear weapons are still on the planet, and the massive, long-term plans that nuclear nations have in place strongly suggest that they have no intention of giving up their nukes anytime soon. All this makes it reasonable to ask: Is the international arms-control regime an outdated charade? That question will be on the minds of arms experts as the 190 signatories to the NPT convene in New York this spring for a review conference they hold every five years. The mood there, it’s fair to assume, is unlikely to be upbeat.
Kevin Baker at
The New Republic Never Forget the Triangle Factory Fire—It's Why We Have Unions:
When we hear politicians today rail against the sins of organized labor, we should remember the Triangle factory fire. Perhaps no event in American history better illustrated the need for unions—public as well as private—and galvanized a generation of policymakers to protect laborers. Frances Perkins, a young social worker visiting a friend in the Village, ran to the fire bells and saw the women fall. She went on to become Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, America's first female cabinet member, and in that capacity would write much of the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. The day the Triangle burned, Perkins would say, “was the day the New Deal began.”
Perkins helped convince New York’s state legislative leaders—Al Smith, Robert Wagner, and “Big Tim” Sullivan—to put together a sweeping investigation of working conditions in New York state. Later, as a U.S. senator, Wagner pushed into law the Wagner Act, a federal guarantee that workers had the right to organize. The minimum wage, the eight-hour day, overtime pay, workmen’s compensation, unemployment compensation, the right to speak your piece and to challenge an employer for firing you—not to mention sprinkler systems, multiple exits, fire alarms, and doors required by law to open from the inside—these are all standards of decency that came directly from those reforms, and helped improve the lives of every citizen.
We are told today that we don’t need any of that and maybe never did.
John Cubelic at the
Los Angeles Times writes
I'm twentysomething, I vote, and I won't take seriously any candidate who doubts climate change:
My vote is up for grabs. Heading into 2016, it will be coveted, along with those of my fellow twentysomethings. For any candidate looking to "inspire the youth vote," here is the key to mine. [...]
Our planet is dying. It is hemorrhaging, suffocating and it is going to flatline. Soon.
Evidence of this inexorable march toward planetary collapse is overwhelming and yet the United States, the nation that considers itself "leader of the free world," can't even agree that it is happening? This is the issue. The only issue. We must do something to slow this trend — because we've already squandered any hope of reversing it. [...]
Climate change is not a political issue — nor strictly an American issue. We are talking about the one and only home our species has. I can no longer take seriously a politician who allows for doubt on this issue. Any candidate who starts a comment on the climate with, "Well, I'm not a scientist ..." can stop right there. That's correct. You are not a scientist. So why don't you talk to one?
Brook Wilensky-Lanford at
The Guardian writes under a headline that could apply to
anything coming from one of Foxaganda's leading lights—
Killing Jesus: Bill O'Reilly's film is touted as history. But facts aren't sacred to him:
illing Jesus—the adaptation of Bill O’Reilly’s book premiering on 29 March—is not history. This might seem like an obvious statement, but it bears repeating, given how the three-hour “television event” is being pitched to viewers: as a restrained Biblical history, suitable for believers and non-believers alike. [...]
O’Reilly’s telling takes as fact a number of time-worn myths that have been repeatedly disavowed by scholars. Characterizing the apostle Paul as a Christian is an anachronism: Christianity didn’t begin until a century after the crucifixion; Jesus and all his apostles died Jews. Scholars have noted with irony that in depicting the Pharisees as legalistic, hypocritical evildoers, O’Reilly, ironically, picks up on a caricature originally created by Reformation-era Protestants to ridicule Catholics.
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times takes a Congressman to the woodshed for his
Imaginary Health Care Horrors:
There’s a lot of fuzzy math in American politics, but Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, the chairman of the House Rules Committee, recently set a new standard when he declared the cost of Obamacare “unconscionable.” If you do “simple multiplication,” he insisted, you find that the coverage expansion is costing $5 million per recipient. But his calculation was a bit off—namely, by a factor of more than a thousand. The actual cost per newly insured American is about $4,000.
Now, everyone makes mistakes. But this wasn’t a forgivable error. Whatever your overall view of the Affordable Care Act, one indisputable fact is that it’s costing taxpayers much less than expected—about 20 percent less, according to the Congressional Budget Office. A senior member of Congress should know that, and he certainly has no business making speeches about an issue if he won’t bother to read budget office reports.