NYT to NYPD:
1. Don’t violate the Constitution
2. Don’t kill unarmed people
To that we can add:
3. Do your jobs
http://t.co/...
— @JoeSudbay
Lamar White, Jr had the original story:
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise Was Reportedly an Honored Guest at 2002 International White Supremacist Convention
and Republicans continue to try and defend this.
Michael Calderone:
How Louisiana Blogger Lamar White, Jr. Landed The Steve Scalise White Supremacist Scoop
Gotta love bloggers.
Re Scalise, I see GOP still struggling with ‘this was unacceptable then, and it’s unacceptable now’. There, I fixed it for them.
— @DemFromCT
NY Times:
Speaker John A. Boehner on Tuesday expressed “full confidence” in Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 3 Republican leader in the House, as he sought to quell a racially charged controversy shaking the party after Mr. Scalise confirmed that he had addressed a white supremacist group a dozen years ago.
Conservative
Michael Brendan Dougherty:
Memo to GOP: Dropping Steve Scalise is a no-brainer
Keeping their majority whip after he palled around with David Duke isn't just impolitic. It's an own goal.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Stephanie Grace:
This is what I remember about the first time I met Steve Scalise 20 years ago: He told me he was like David Duke without the baggage...
He’d hardly be the only politician to make such a deal with himself. In 1996, commentator and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan disavowed an endorsement from Duke, even as he fielded a Louisiana delegate slate with at least one former Duke campaign official. Former Gov. Mike Foster paid Duke for a valuable voter contact list, then failed to disclose it, explaining once word got out that it wasn’t “cool” to be associated with him.
No, it’s not. But like robbers drawn to banks because that’s where the money is, politicians go where the voters are. And they, I guess, tell themselves what they need to hear in order to sleep at night.
NY Times:
But Democrats and some influential Republican commentators called for Mr. Scalise to step down from his post, questioning how he could not have known about the group’s bigoted views given the attention the group received in the state at the time and its ties to the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who is also from Louisiana.
“This is acidic for the Republican Party,” said Peter Wehner, a former adviser to President George W. Bush. “I just think it is an untenable position to have a person in the leadership of the Republican Party in the House who has spoken to a white supremacist group.”
WaPo:
Some Republicans praised Boehner for his actions, expressing their eagerness to start the new Congress in a position of strength to fully exploit their gains in the midterm elections. But others worried about the potential political fallout from a fresh racial controversy for a party anxious to show its broadening appeal to minorities ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
John Weaver, a GOP consultant who advised the presidential campaigns of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said in an e-mail that Scalise “cannot serve in leadership in our party as we’re in the process of trying to show the American people we can handle the burden of governing, especially in a country so divided across all demographic lines.”
The arrogance of the Republicans really knows no bounds. How else to explain the tone deaf defense?
James Fallows has an amazing (and long) read:
The Tragedy of the American Military
The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.
There was a time (Phil Silvers, McHale's Navy) where the con men wore a uniform, and America (closer to military service than now) laughed. Times have changed.
Josh Marshall:
A week ago I got an email from TPM Reader LC (not his actual initials, for reasons which will become clear). LC is a couple-decades-in police officer in the suburban New York area. He wanted to take issue with one of my points, a central point, in my post about Michael Brown from a few weeks ago: that Darren Wilson's grand jury version of events simply wasn't credible. I wanted to hear what LC had to say; I've wondered about my own contention about that. But one of the many things that made LC's take especially interesting to me is that he's a self-identified progressive Democrat, not only that but a longtime TPM Reader and even a Prime subscriber.
That interested me for a couple reasons. Cops obviously come in all races and all political persuasions. But on balance they lean heavily conservative, not necessarily on pocket book issues but on social and, for lack of a better phrase, law and order issues. The evidence for this is too voluminous to require discussion and probably not surprising to most people. So I was interested to hear more about what that's like: being a cop and a liberal. But what interested me a lot more was an opportunity to challenge my own assumptions and get a deeper understanding of stuff - perceptions, values, etc. - that I don't know enough about. To be specific, it allowed me - probably as much as is ever really possible - to get a perspective which separated out things that are inherent to police work from conservative values and political beliefs which are often overlaid on to them because of the demographics of the profession.
Tamara Keith:
The Fleeting Obsessions Of The White House Press Corps
AP:
The first 50-state report on the latest sign-up season under President Barack Obama's health care law shows that more than 4 million people selected plans for the first time or re-enrolled in what the administration called "an encouraging start."
More than 3.4 million people enrolled using HealthCare.gov as of Dec. 15, and more than 600,000 people selected plans in the state-run marketplaces, according to a Department of Health and Human Services report released Tuesday. The figures are generally up-to-date through Dec. 13.