Visual source: Newseum
Gail Collins:
The presidential race is barely under way, but already we have had our first Big Thought. I am speaking, of course, of Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that he was driven into serial adultery by hard work and patriotism.
...
People, can we all agree now that men who spend their early and middle ages betraying women right and left are not allowed to get credit for discovering the joys of monogamy at about the same time that they receive their first Social Security check?
Scott Walker defends his actions in a Washington Post op-ed:
My brother is a banquet manager and occasional bartender at a hotel. He pays nearly $800 a month for his family’s health insurance and can put away only a little bit toward his 401(k). He would love the plan I’m offering to public employees.
As my brother recognizes, our plan is a good deal for government workers when compared with what other middle-class workers are paying for benefits. It would be a great deal for federal workers.
Also, blah blah blah Obama administration blah blah blah union bosses.
New York Times:
More than two months after the killings in Tucson, Ariz., and some 2,400 American gun deaths later, President Obama has finally broken his silence on gun violence.
The New York Times calls this "a promising start," but E.J. Dionne, calls it "baby steps":
What Obama endorsed were, well, baby steps toward strengthening background checks to keep guns out of the hands of “dangerous criminals and fugitives” and those who are “unbalanced.” That’s a fine idea, though his specific proposals — “enforcing laws that are already on the books,” “reward the states that provide the best data,” “make the system faster and nimbler” — were hardly the stuff of political courage.
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Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, explained the approach in an e-mail. “There are real problems that need to be solved, so we could just retreat to traditional positions and rehash the old arguments until we are blue in the face, but we have done that for the last couple of decades,” he said. “Or we could try something different — drain some of the politics from this and look for areas where we can actually get something done.”
A lovely idea, and if it gets us more rational gun laws, I’ll be the first to admit it. But the administration’s growing affection for false equivalences that put positions Obama purportedly agrees with on the same level as positions he opposes is becoming insidious.
Dana Milbank:
It seems everybody is afraid of Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor charged by President Obama with setting up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page called her “President Warren” and a “czar” in command of an “empire.” Richard Shelby of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate banking committee, thinks she’s orchestrating a “regulatory shakedown” of mortgage companies. And Spencer Bachus, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told Warren on Wednesday that she is “probably directing the most powerful agency that’s ever been created in Washington.”
That will come as news to the Pentagon.
Doyle McManus:
The war in Afghanistan, our longest war, is well into its 10th year. It claimed the lives of 499 U.S. troops in 2010, and more lives will be lost once the "fighting season" resumes in the spring. The financial cost of the conflict is heading toward $300 million a day.
Yet when the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, testified before Senate and House committees this week, most of the seats in the public and news media sections were empty. Senators and House members drifted in and out, just as they do in hearings about farm price supports or bank reform. Two demonstrators from Code Pink stood as Petraeus testified, quietly uttered a sentence or two of protest — "The American people don't support this war" — and left peaceably. It wasn't so much a disruption as a ritual invocation.
Joshua Green:
WHEN SOMETHING big happens, Washington tends to react impulsively. Whether or not it’s helpful or appropriate, some cosmic force seems to impel congressmen before the cameras, and before you know it, they’re demanding hearings, bills, new commissions — in a word, action. The disaster unfolding at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has riveted everybody here, as it has around the world. But so far, the response has been measured and cautious.
This may seem surprising, since any significant event these days is treated as an occasion to seek partisan advantage. That’s particularly so with such visceral issues as nuclear energy. Yet practically no one has echoed Greenpeace in “calling for the phase out of existing reactors, and no construction of new commercial nuclear reactors.’’
On the contrary, most lawmakers and administration officials have hastened to emphasize that their views about nuclear power are still the opposite of those held by the likes of Greenpeace, even in the wake of the Japanese catastrophe.
Joan Vennochi:
SENATOR JOHN Kerry has been his party’s presidential nominee and its whipping boy after losing.
Now, after clawing his way back to respect, the senior senator from Massachusetts is starting to do what he should do at this moment in political time. He’s finally celebrating the Ted Kennedy definition of Democrat.
Meghan Daum demands that NPR come clean about whether it has a liberal bias:
Here's the real problem, NPR. No matter how mainstream your audience is in truth, or how balanced you are in substance, or how many opinions you solicit from average red-state Joes, the prevailing feeling is that your style is unmistakably liberal.
In other words, NPR, you may not be left-leaning, but you're left-seeming.
It's the folksy music between segments (never mind that it's often jazzy or electronic or classical; the effect is folksy). It's the warm, earnest quality of the hosts' and reporters' voices. It's their exotic names — Mandalit del Barco, Lakshmi Singh, Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Daniel Zwerdling. Are these tea party names? No, they're soy chai latte names. It's obvious.
Face it, NPR, you could go content-free, relying only on those quirky music snippets and reporters saying their names, and you'd still come across as a granola bar disguised as a radio network.
