Politico:
Attorney General Eric Holder has decided not to try to force New York Times reporter James Risen to identify a confidential source, defusing a high-profile showdown with the Fourth Estate that could have led to Risen being jailed for contempt of court, a source familiar with the situation said Friday.
“The attorney general has ruled out compelling him to divulge his source,” the person close to the process said.
Pete Williams:
Attorney General Eric Holder has decided against forcing a reporter for The New York Times to reveal the identity of a confidential source, according to a senior Justice Department official.
The reporter, James Risen, has been battling for years to stop prosecutors from forcing him to name his source for a book that revealed a CIA effort to sabotage Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
The government wanted Risen’s testimony in the trial of a former CIA official, Jeffrey Sterling, accused of leaking classified information.
But now, according to the Justice Department official, Holder has directed that Risen must not be required to reveal “information about the identity of his source.”
Good move.
More politics and policy below the fold.
NY Times:
Mayor Bill de Blasio rose to power promising a new era of cultural comity in New York City, generating big expectations that he could heal longstanding urban divisions over ethnicity, money and class.
But amid a national uproar over police and race, prompted in part by the death of an unarmed black man, Eric Garner, on Staten Island, New Yorkers now think race relations in their city are deeply strained. More than half of residents — blacks and whites alike — say the city is headed in the wrong direction, according to a poll by The New York Times and Siena College.
That unease is an unexpected turn for Mr. de Blasio, a liberal Democrat who has staked his mayoralty on remaking the way New Yorkers interact with law enforcement. But the poll’s findings suggest the mayor’s efforts have been buffeted, and at times overtaken, by events outside of his control.
The survey, conducted this month in the days after a grand jury declined to issue criminal charges in the Garner case, found that two-thirds of New Yorkers disagreed with the decision and believed the white police officer who placed Mr. Garner in a chokehold shortly before his death should have been indicted.
Read the above carefully. It's the Democratic problem in a nutshell. Whites don't trust de Blasio even as they agree about the basics. It's not that de Blasio has lost them, it's that the truth about race relations (they aren't great) makes people uncomfortable.
Greg Sargent:
Yale University has funded an interesting new Associated Press poll that goes deep into Americans’ attitudes towards climate change. Hopefully, its findings will encourage Democrats to talk as much as possible about the issue.
The key findings are that Americans believe by 56-20 that global warming is happening; 72 percent are very or moderately worried about it; and 50 percent say human activity is a key cause.
That’s good. But the question then becomes: What are Americans prepared to do about it? And on that score, the poll goes deeper into public opinion, with more heartening results:
* By 50-23, Americans favor “U.S. participation in the development of a new international treaty to address global warming.” As I’ve noted here before, the negotiation of such a treaty next year could make the question of whether the U.S. participates an issue in the 2016 presidential race.
Pew:
The Great Recession, fueled by the crises in the housing and financial markets, was universally hard on the net worth of American families. But even as the economic recovery has begun to mend asset prices, not all households have benefited alike, and wealth inequality has widened along racial and ethnic lines.
The wealth of white households was 13 times the median wealth of black households in 2013, compared with eight times the wealth in 2010, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. Likewise, the wealth of white households is now more than 10 times the wealth of Hispanic households, compared with nine times the wealth in 2010.
Kevin Drum:
The worst part of the "cromnibus" spending bill was the provision that guts a small piece of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and allows banks to get back into the custom swaps business. So why did Democratic negotiators agree to this? In a long tick-tock published yesterday, Politico tells us:
During [] negotiations with House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), his Senate counterpart, agreed to keep the provision in exchange for more funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to aides.
OK. Democrats have been ambivalent about this particular provision of Dodd-Frank from the start, and therefore they were willing to cut a deal that allowed Republicans to repeal it. But what about the rest of the spending bill? Republicans got a bunch of venal little favors inserted, but what did Democrats get? Here's retiring Rep. Jim Moran:
In 20 years of being on the appropriations bill, I haven’t seen a better compromise in terms of Democratic priorities. Implementing the Affordable Care Act, there’s a lot more money for early-childhood development — the only priority that got cut was the EPA but we gave them more money than the administration asked for....There were 26 riders that were extreme and would have devastated the Environmental Protection Agency in terms of the Clean Water and Clean Air Act administration; all of those were dropped. There were only two that were kept and they wouldn’t have been implemented this fiscal year. So, we got virtually everything that the Democrats tried to get.
Well, there's that. But more sucky political practice from Democrats if they can't explain it.