Stable D primary numbers over last month from
Reuters
Steve Benen:
Even die-hard GOP partisans sometimes find it difficult to justify the House Republicans’ Benghazi committee. The party struggled to explain why it was necessary in the first place – the deadly 2012 attack was already examined by seven other congressional committees – and the rationale is even more elusive now that the investigation is the longest in the history of the United States.
Making matters slightly worse, the GOP-led committee has conducted itself in such a way as to raise concerns that the entire endeavor is little more than a taxpayer-funded election scheme.
Keep that in mind when reading about House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) – the likely next Speaker of the House – and his interview on Fox News last night. Roll Call reported this morning on the Republican leader’s on-air comments:
“What you’re going to see is a conservative Speaker, that takes a conservative Congress, that puts a strategy to fight and win. And let me give you one example. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?
“But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known that any of that had happened had we not fought to make that happen.”
Michael Kinsley once said a political gaffe occurs when a politician accidentally tells the truth. By this measure, the man who’s likely to become Speaker of the House next month made an important mistake last night.
Chris Cillizza:
House Republicans are in the midst of a coronation of California Congressman Kevin McCarthy as the next Speaker of the House. McCarthy's comments about the motives of the House select committee investigating the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, on Tuesday night, however, should give the party pause about whether he's totally ready for the big job.
Prodded repeatedly by conservative Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity to name an accomplishment for the Republican-led Congress, McCarthy seized on the Benghazi committee and its investigation into Hillary Clinton's role (or lack thereof) in the handling of the incident during her time as secretary of state.
"Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?" McCarthy told Hannity. "But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she's untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought."
Whoops!
More politics and policy below the fold.
EJ Dionne:
But McCarthy’s statement gave Democrats what they have long sought: a rather strong public hint that this investigation was never on the level. “This stunning concession from Rep. McCarthy reveals the truth that Republicans never dared admit in public,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the committee’s ranking Democrat. “The core Republican goal in establishing the Benghazi committee was always to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and never to conduct an evenhanded search for the facts.” Clinton’s defenders hope McCarthy’s statement might prod the media to pay attention to the current behavior of the accusers and not just the past behavior of the accused.
McCarthy’s admission once again ratified the writer Michael Kinsley’s long-ago but still brilliant observation that a gaffe occurs “when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” But why did McCarthy do it? Consider the nature of the House Republican Party he’d like to lead.
Simon Maloy:
This is an archetypal example of the Kinsley Gaffe: a politician accidentally uttering a truthful statement. Anyone who’s paid even cursory attention to the GOP’s treatment of the Benghazi attacks will likely have already concluded that the party’s interest in the matter is linked to Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. But it’s still bracing to see one of the most powerful Republicans in Washington come right out and brag about how he and his colleagues set up a taxpayer-funded investigation to damage the political prospects of the opposition party’s leading presidential candidate. It’s downright scandalous, and precisely the sort of political corruption that Republicans argue is at the heart of the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi.
No less remarkable is the fact that McCarthy offered up the politicized Benghazi investigation as an “example” of how he would conduct business as Speaker of the House. He just put it right out there and told Sean Hannity that the McCarthy Congress will be a series of investigations aimed at hurting the Democrats’ chances of electoral success.
He’s also impugned what little credibility Benghazi committee chair Trey Gowdy enjoys, and he’s given critics of the committee all the reason they need to trash the committee as a disreputable and untrustworthy exercise in partisan scapegoating. One Democratic member of the Benghazi committee had already called for the investigation to be shut down, and other Democrats are doing the same in the aftermath of McCarthy’s remarks.
New England Journal of Medicine:
We strongly support Planned Parenthood not only for its efforts to channel fetal tissue into important medical research but also for its other work as one of the country’s largest providers of health care for women, especially poor women. In 2013, the most recent year for which data are available, Planned Parenthood provided services to 2.7 million women, men, and young people during 4.6 million health center visits. At least 60% of these patients benefited from public health coverage programs such as the nation’s family-planning program (Title X) and Medicaid. At least 78% of these patients lived with incomes at or below 150% of the federal poverty level. Planned Parenthood’s services included nearly 400,000 Pap tests, nearly 500,000 breast examinations, nearly 4.5 million tests for sexually transmitted illnesses (including HIV), and treatments.2,3 The contraception services that Planned Parenthood delivers may be the single greatest effort to prevent the unwanted pregnancies that result in abortions.
From
Vox, what the PP chart at the Tuesday hearing looked like:
And what the data actually is, with a Y axis:
Whether it's Benghazi or Planned Parenthood, the bald face lying on Capitol Hill by Republicans is reaching new heights of absurdity. It's no wonder literally
everyone hates Congress. Why wouldn't you?
Pat Garofolo:
Every time something goes awry in the Middle East, Obama's detractors break into a chorus of "do more." But "more" still wouldn't solve anything. Syria is embroiled in a long, brutal civil war, with a number of sects each controlling its own territory. The country as we know it is probably history no matter which way the war ends; people who could be friendly to the U.S. and in a position to emerge victorious are few and far between. Anyone who says that some simple intervention will turn the tide against Assad and end the bloodshed – "just implement a no-fly zone," "train the right rebels," "Obama needs to lead" – is peddling snake oil.
Actually committing to unseating Assad and then preventing someone even worse from swooping in after him would require a huge number of lives and who knows how much money, and there's no indication that, even with such a commitment, the U.S. could actually accomplish its goals. (Again, see Iraq.) Obama can't undo decades of grievances and years of bloodletting by simply waving an ObamaWand.
LA Times on an anti-vaxxer fail:
Opponents of a new child vaccination law in California have reported that they turned in some 228,000 signatures on petitions for a referendum to overturn the measure, far short of the number needed to qualify it for next year's ballot.
Referendum supporters needed the signatures of 365,880 registered voters by Monday to place the measure before state voters in November 2016.
The referendum was intended to overturn a law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in June eliminating personal-belief exemptions that allowed some parents to avoid having their children vaccinated before they entered kindergarten.
The Atlantic:
Gun-rights advocates have waged a relentless battle to gut what remains of America’s lax and inadequate gun regulations. In the name of the Second Amendment, they are challenging the constitutionality of state and municipal “may issue” regulations that restrict the right to carry weapons in public to persons who can show a compelling need to be armed. A few courts are starting to take these challenges seriously. But what the advocates do not acknowledge—and some courts seem not to understand—is that their arguments are grounded in precedent unique to the violent world of the slaveholding South.
The Guardian:
Ask people where they were on 9/11, and most have a memory to share. Ask where they were when Lehman Brothers collapsed, and many will struggle even to remember the correct year. The 158-year-old Wall Street bank filed for bankruptcy on 15 September 2008. As the news broke, insiders experienced an atmosphere of unprecedented panic. One former investment banker recalled: “I thought: so this is what the threat of war must feel like. I remember looking out of the window and seeing the buses drive by. People everywhere going through a normal working day – or so they thought. I realised: they have no idea. I called my father from the office to tell him to transfer all his savings to a safer bank. Going home that day, I was genuinely terrified.”
A veteran at a small credit rating agency who spent his whole career in the City of London told me with genuine emotion: “It was terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. We came so close to a global meltdown.” He had been on holiday in the week Lehman went bust. “I remember opening up the paper every day and going: ‘Oh my God.’ I was on my BlackBerry following events. Confusion, embarrassment, incredulity ... I went through the whole gamut of human emotions. At some point my wife threatened to throw my BlackBerry in the lake if I didn’t stop reading on my phone. I couldn’t stop.”
Other financial workers in the City, who were at their desks after Lehman defaulted, described colleagues sitting frozen before their screens, paralysed – unable to act even when there was easy money to be made. Things were looking so bad, they said, that some got on the phone to their families: “Get as much money from the ATM as you can.” “Rush to the supermarket to hoard food.” “Buy gold.” “Get everything ready to evacuate the kids to the country.” As they recalled those days, there was often a note of shame in their voices, as if they felt humiliated by the memory of their vulnerability. Even some of the most macho traders became visibly uncomfortable. One said to me in a grim voice: “That was scary, mate. I mean, not film scary. Really scary.”