Your one stop pundit shop.
Dana Milbank:
The feminist movement has a new slogan: "Tits for an Ass."
This felicitous phrase was coined by none other than the National Organization for Women, which Wednesday morning arrived on Capitol Hill with 1,500 nipples -- the rubber kind from baby bottles.
The nipples, in cellophane gift bags with purple ribbon, were presented to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform by NOW "as part of its 'Tits for an Ass' campaign calling for the removal of Alan Simpson."
E.J. Dionne:
A president who largely disdained a mobilizing strategy for his first year and a half in office has returned to his community-organizer roots to try to salvage an election. Here's the further irony: He has a real chance of pulling it off, which leads to a question. If Obama succeeds, will he continue to keep his supporters engaged and "fired up," as Sanders suggests he should? Or will he go back to an insider strategy that helped bring him to the brink of this precipice?
Gail Collins:
Let’s talk for a minute about education.
... kudos to the new documentary “Waiting for Superman” for ratcheting up the interest level. It follows the fortunes of five achingly adorable children and their hopeful, dedicated, worried parents in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., as they try to gain entrance to high-performing charter schools. Not everybody gets in, and by the time you leave the theater you are so sad and angry you just want to find something to burn down.
My own particular, narrow wrath was focused on the ritual at the heart of the movie, where parents and kids sit nervously in an auditorium, holding their lottery numbers while somebody pulls out balls and announces the lucky winners of seats in next fall’s charter school class. The lucky families jump up and down and scream with joy while the losing parents and kids cry. In some of the lotteries, there are 20 heartbroken children for every happy one.
Charter schools, please, stop. I had no idea you selected your kids with a piece of performance art that makes the losers go home feeling like they’re on a Train to Failure at age 6. You can do better. Use the postal system.
Joshua Green:
Brainteaser: Name the last major law to draw meaningful bipartisan support in Congress. Tough question, isn’t it? The answer is the Troubled Asset Relief Program, better known as “the Wall Street bailout.’’
Hard to believe now, but before President Bush signed the $700 billion rescue plan into law in October 2008, it passed the House by a 228-205 vote, with 91 Republicans in support, and the Senate by a 74-25 vote, with 32 Republicans. But you won’t hear much bragging. The loudest theme on the fall campaign trail is full-throated outrage at the depravity of the bailouts and those who voted for them.
George Will decides to embrace the teabaggers and says that:
Democrats, unable to run on their policies, will try to demonize the opponents with Tea Party support as unstable extremists with personality disorders. They have ridden this hobby horse before.
... and proceeds to tell a story from 1964, because, of course, he cannot successfully argue that Sharron "Second Amendment remedies" Angle, or Christine "I can make everyone in the country stop having sex" O'Donnell, or Rand "business owners should be able to discriminate against minorities" Paul, and their ilk aren't unstable extremists with personality disorders.
Ted Nugent will be drummed off of the pages of The Washington Times for this suggestion to the GOP:
GOP candidates and politicians should self-impose term limits and pledge to serve just two terms in the House or one term in the Senate and then leave Washington for good, never to return.
But the Republican Party should definitely embrace the rest of Ted's own little pledge to teabaggery ... there's some real winners in there.
Timothy Egan:
It was early still, and daylight, so when I called up The Dude to get his take on new polls showing California on the verge of becoming the first state to legalize, tax and regulate recreational use of marijuana, I knew he wouldn’t be, um, distracted. Not just yet. [...]
And on Proposition 19, The Dude speaks truth to power. We talked about the opposition to legalizing pot — the alcohol industry and people currently making the most money off California’s nutty medicinal marijuana retail scheme.
“If you take out the special interests, the entrenched groups, with any of these issues — whether it’s energy, the financial sector, or legalized marijuana — it’s always very clear what the right thing to do is,” said The Dude.
He was echoing, in his way, an old truth of politics: that the best way to judge what’s really at stake in an election is to follow the money. And the source of the funds being used to dissuade Californians from legalizing pot says a lot about the end-stage hypocrisies of the arthritic war on drugs.