US Politics

"When the Senate Judiciary Committee meets on Monday to resume marking up an immigration bill, it will have two weeks of solid achievement to build on. The bipartisan “Gang of Eight” that drafted the deal has so far held together. The full committee has rejected an array of amendments designed to cripple or kill the bill, while adopting technical fixes and other amendments to make the system fairer, smarter and more generous." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma voted against the Hurricane Sandy relief package, arguing at the time that the bill was a "slush fund." But on MSNBC this morning he suggested that he would support disaster aid for Oklahoma, because that process will be "totally different."" - Andrew C (✓) from Bookmarklet

"The Sandy bill, he said, was unnecessarily expansive. [...] But "that won't happen in Oklahoma," he said, not specifying why he was so sure." - Andrew C (✓)

"Mr. Inhofe's Oklahoma colleague, Senator Tom Coburn, who also voted against Sandy relief, seemed more sensitive to possible allegations of hypocrisy. He stressed that he would "absolutely" demand budget cuts to offset federal assistance. Of course he also promised that "any and all available aid will be delivered without delay." That's exactly as it should be. Residents of New York and New Jersey, however, certainly did not get that treatment. They had to wait out months of Republican obstruction."" - Andrew C (✓)

Cabela’s sells everything from fishing rods to wool slippers. But guns are the real moneymaker, and while fears of future gun restrictions have spurred sales for the entire industry, no company has benefited quite like Cabela’s. Shares have increased by 95% in the last year and are up more than 70% already in 2013. That makes Cabela’s stock the best-performing in the firearms industry and one of the top-performing stocks in the U.S. in the last year. The company’s two biggest shareholders, founders Richard and James Cabela, have seen the value of their combined 25% stake jump to $1.2 billion from $750 million at the start of 2013. About one-third of Cabela’s $3.1 billion in sales last year came from firearms, ammunition and accessories, and a substantial amount of its all-important sales growth came from its gun business. Cabela’s first-quarter 2013 same-store sales growth was 24%, but it was only 9% excluding firearms and ammunition. The company set a new record for first-quarter revenue, which increased 28.7% to $802.5 million. - Eric from Bookmarklet

"We could build the California HSR [a 16+ year project] for this, basically. And we spend it every year [on the war in Afghanistan]." - Andrew C (✓) from Bookmarklet

Some figures put California's HSR phase 1 at $68B, so I don't know if he's counting phase 2, transposed the digits, or just assumes phase 1 will overrun its projected costs. - Andrew C (✓)

"What happened is clear. [Jonathan] Karl lied to us [about the stupid Benghazi thing] because he trusted his source. His source, however, burned him, and Karl's lie was exposed. Instead of burning his source to show that he takes this matter seriously and won't be lied to again, he is doubling down and protecting his source, because as we all know with our current media, access is more important to accuracy. If the editors at ABC News had any damned integrity, Karl would be forced to expose his source, apologize, and then take a couple weeks off. Maybe some summer school ethics course." - Andrew C (✓) from Bookmarklet

Many factors are acknowledged as contributing to GM’s decline: it juggled too many brands, over-extended its dealer network, failed to respond rapidly to market cues, and struggled to work with its union, the United Auto Workers. But the extent of its problems with the UAW is astonishing—and the problems themselves warrant explanation. Consider some of the onerous arrangements that GM’s management agreed to. Labor costs for a typical UAW worker at a GM plant were by some estimates $73 per hour—compared to the $44 per hour for workers at non-unionized Toyota and Honda plants in the U.S. Or take the infamous “jobs bank”: surplus workers, rather than getting laid off, would receive 95% of their full salaries plus benefits while the company waited to reassign them. But instead of being temporarily idle, thousands of “bankers” would be there for months, if not years, while they watched movies, solved crosswords, and just passed the time. Some senior employees would even pull strings to get... more... - Eric from Bookmarklet

"Doug Altner is analyst and instructor at the Ayn Rand Institute" - and now I understand why he left out those points. - Andrew C (✓)

"The Senate Judiciary Committee will almost certainly pass the sprawling immigration overhaul bill by the end of the week" - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

:-| - Halil

*bump* because... - Halil

Monday's news that struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo! bought popular blogging site Tumblr inspired us to find the best foreign policy-related Tumblrs -- loosely defined -- on the ‘net. Several great ones that have come and gone deserve a mention, including the one-time-only Vladentines Day and the sadly obsolete but viral Texts From Hillary, but we chose to focus on those accounts that are (for the most part) still active. Scroll away! - Eric from Bookmarklet

The recent snowfall also broke the daily record for liquid precipitation, lowest maximum temperature for May 17, and a host of other records. - Eric from Bookmarklet

"While voters overall may think Congress' focus should be elsewhere there's no doubt about how mad Republicans are about Benghazi. 41% say they consider this to be the biggest political scandal in American history [...] Republicans think by a 74/19 margin than Benghazi is a worse political scandal than Watergate, by a 74/12 margin that it's worse than Teapot Dome, and by a 70/20 margin that it's worse than Iran Contra." - Andrew C (✓) from Bookmarklet

"One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal in American history is that 39% of them don't actually know where it is. 10% think it's in Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess." - Andrew C (✓)

"Prospects for passage of a major immigration bill improved on Thursday when a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House of Representatives declared they had reached a tentative deal, resolving disputes that had threatened to torpedo negotiations." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Since September, Republicans have claimed the Obama administration covered up the truth about the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya by altering the talking points Susan Rice used on the Sunday morning talk shows. To bolster the story, Republicans misquoted or significantly embellished the emails officials used to draft Rice’s remarks, the CBS Evening News reported Thursday. CBS News’ Major Garrett confirmed that it was a GOP source who leaked the altered emails. The miscast quotes affect at least two emails that include a State Department spokesperson and a White House deputy adviser — the two parties GOP lawmakers insist were trying to engage a cover-up on behalf of the Obama administration to protect the president’s chances of re-election." - Hieronymous Thalidomide from Bookmarklet

Keep dreaming. :D - Steven Perez

"Recently, a shocking Department of Defense report showed that the estimated number of sexual assaults in the military dramatically increased to a record 26,000 last year. Tragically, only a small number of these crimes were ever reported, let alone brought to trial. Survivors of these vicious crimes are scared to come forward because they doubt that the military and its criminal justice system will protect them and punish the perpetrators. It is no secret why. A full 62 percent of those who reported a sexual assault felt they were then victims again when they were retaliated against. Moreover, senior military officers with no legal training have the power to decide whether a case goes to trial, or even to throw out a military judge or jury's verdict. Our service men and women deserve better." - Hieronymous Thalidomide from Bookmarklet

Last week Heritage Foundation scholar Jason Richwine, coauthor of a hotly disputed new study on the fiscal costs of comprehensive immigration reform, resigned his position in a hail of controversy over his 2009 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation. In that dissertation Richwine had argued, among other things, that American “Hispanics” are less intelligent than native-born whites as evidenced by their lower average scores on IQ tests. Richwine then attributed Hispanics’ alleged intellectual inferiority at least partly to genetic factors. The Richwine affair is just the latest flap in a long-running dispute over the significance of IQ tests and group differences in IQ scores. It’s easy enough to shut down that debate with cries of racism, but stigmatizing a point of view as morally tainted isn’t the same thing as demonstrating that it’s untrue. Here I want to explain why Richwine’s position is intellectually as well as morally unsound. - Eric from Bookmarklet

OK, but it's the other way around: since others have already demonstrated it's untrue, continuing to hold that point of view _is_ morally tainted. - Andrew C (✓)

Thought I posted this before, I might actually have done so but lost it behind FF's lookback limit. - Andrew C (✓) from Bookmarklet

Terrifying. - Stephen Mack #TeamMomo from iPhone

Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker warned of the risks of an asset bubble forming given the incredible amount of liquidity the Bernanke Fed has injected into the market, even though he said banks are substantially stronger than before the crisis on Wednesday. Volcker also indicated that in the U.S. government makes up about 35% of GDP and that the financing of the residential mortgage market by the state has led to a dysfunctional financial system. - Eric from Bookmarklet

"After Jake Tapper exposed ABC's Benghazi email scoop as edited to make Obama look bad, ABC News admitted that they lied to America. They never actually read the original emails." - Andrew C (✓) from Bookmarklet

"In the process of trying to defend himself, Karl exposed his own lies, "This is how I reported the contents of that e-mail, quoting verbatim a source who reviewed the original documents and shared detailed notes." (In his original story, Karl claimed that ABC News had obtained the emails. This obviously wasn't true.) Karl also explained that he and ABC News never reviewed the emails, [...] Jon Karl wrote that nobody could get copies the emails. If this was true, how did Jake Tapper get them? " - Andrew C (✓)

"The direct outreach is part of an intensifying campaign by Silicon Valley to shape and push immigration reform — particularly the high-skilled portion that goes directly to tech companies’ recruiting and hiring practices. It also reflects the industry’s growing footprint in Washington, where tech companies and groups are spending record amounts on lobbying on a broad range of issues spanning immigration to cybersecurity to online privacy." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"President Barack Obama's political support group is joining with a Republican pro-immigration organization and an effort run by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to try to boost support for a comprehensive immigration bill. Organizing for Action, a grassroots group run by Obama loyalists that grew out of his 2012 re-election campaign, will co-sponsor a "virtual march on Washington" planned for next week aimed at getting people to use social media platforms to register their support for the immigration legislation." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"Frank Bruni's column in the New York Times today deplores what he calls the permanent circus in Washington, which is now manifest by the unspooling of the IRS story, the AP phone records story, and, of course, Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! As should be obvious by now, I agree, [...] A lot of scandals are created from no substance at all. See "Clinton, Bill" for details." - Andrew C (✓) from Bookmarklet

"Ratfking has a long history in American politics, and I'd be loath to preside over its disappearance. Politics would become remarkably boring. However, we used to know what it was, and what to do with the people when they got caught practicing it. We used to be able to distinguish ratfking from actual reporting. That all fell apart during the Clinton years, [...] If you were part of... more... - Andrew C (✓)

"As your kindergarten teacher probably told you, two wrongs do not make a right. But the discrepancy in reactions to wrongs does, indeed, show how Washington so often serves the interests of the political right." - Andrew C (✓) from Bookmarklet

Yeah, his own party filibustered Bush's immigration bill. - John (bird whisperer)

"Nick Confessore has an interesting piece in The New York Times today that delves a little deeper into how (and why) the IRS may have been examining somewhat more closely the various conservative groups that sprang up in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which is what led somehat directly to the bureaucratic dumbassery in Cincinnati that's got everyone in DC all hot and bothered. Confessore's reporting indicates that, faced with a staggering amount of new work, the IRS may have simply picked what it believed were easier groups to examine, leaving alone the huge 501(c)(4)'s of the type founded by Karl Rove, at least partly because the latter were able to afford better lawyers." - Andrew C (✓) from Bookmarklet

"However, I thought the more interesting element of the story was how Citizens United forced upon the IRS the job of regulating the insane way we have allowed money to drown our political system." - Andrew C (✓)

"This is just another example of how we have come to use taxes and the tax code as an instrument to create and sustain public policy. We do not appropriate money directly for X -- Because government spending baaaaaaaaddd!!! -- and, instead, we arrange tax breaks, and tax credits. That puts the IRS in our daily lives more often than simply the late hours of every April 15. Now, because... more... - Andrew C (✓)

The supply shock created by a surge in North American oil production will be as transformative to the market over the next five years as was the rise of Chinese demand over the last 15, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its annual Medium-Term Oil Market Report (MTOMR) released today. The shift will not only cause oil companies to overhaul their global investment strategies, but also reshape the way oil is transported, stored and refined. According to the MTOMR, the effects of continued growth in North American supply – led by US light, tight oil (LTO) and Canadian oil sands – will cascade through the global oil market. Although shale oil development outside North America may not be a large-scale reality during the report’s five-year timeframe, the technologies responsible for the boom will increase production from mature, conventional fields – causing companies to reconsider investments in higher-risk areas. In virtually every other aspect of the market, developing... more... - Eric from Bookmarklet

"Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them down. The charges come from two quarters, from Republicans critical of the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials shifting blame for Benghazi onto the State Department." - Hieronymous Thalidomide from Bookmarklet

"Is this a tale of hard intelligence being distorted for political advantage? Maybe. Did Victoria Nuland scrub the talking points to serve Clinton or President Obama? That charge is completely unsupported by the evidence. She was caught in a brutal interagency turf war, and she defended her department. The accusations against her are bogus." - Hieronymous Thalidomide

"Here's hoping the Heritage spends its time getting more serious about producing methodologically sound work on immigration." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"The real issue is this: Will Heritage, under the relatively new leadership of former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) start producing serious work again? " -- No. This has been Simple Answers to Simple Questions. - Andrew C (✓)

"Here's what places like Detroit, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh do have, however: big universities, if not inside their city limits, then fairly close by. And so unsurprisingly, some Rust Belt efforts at immigrant outreach have been focused on convincing international students to stay put after graduation." - LANjackal from Bookmarklet

"By a vote of 223-204, the House on Wednesday passed the Working Families Flexibility Act, which allows employers to offer hourly workers comp time when they exceed their 40-hour workweek. It was a party line vote, with all but a few Democrats voting against the bill. Republicans say the bill is family-friendly and gives workers the flexibility to choose how they would like to be compensated for their overtime - either with comp time or with overtime pay. Currently, employers must offer hourly workers "time and a half" for every hour they work over 40 hours a week." - Andrew C (✓) from Bookmarklet

This bill is so amazingly disgusting it's clear it was written by corporate lobbyists. - Anika

"Former Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell has been found guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of three babies authorities said were born alive before having their necks cut with scissors. A jury found Gosnell not guilty of first-degree murder in a fourth baby’s death. In addition to the murder charges, the 72-year-old was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the overdose death of former patient Karnamaya Mongar. Gosnell was also found guilty of several other crimes including one count of infanticide, two counts of conspiracy, 21 of 24 counts of abortion of an unborn child of 24 weeks or more and 208 of 227 counts of violation of informed consent of an abortion. In all, Gosnell was found guilty of 237 crimes. He will now face the death penalty in the sentencing phase, which will begin a week from Tuesday." - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet

For two weeks in the summer of 1982, U.S. and Soviet jets dueled in the skies over Lebanon in one of the largest aerial dogfights since World War II. The pilots were Israelis and Syrians. In a classic Cold War proxy battle, U.S.-backed Israel humiliated Soviet-backed Syria, downing 86 MiGs without a single loss. It was the finest example of Israel’s strategic value to the United States: In return for the planes, Israel served as America’s shield and a model for the superiority of American-made weaponry. In the summer of 2013, American-made Israeli jets are humiliating Syria once again. Israel’s ability to evade sophisticated Russian-made anti-aircraft systems to bomb Syrian territory over the past week does not just signal a possible expansion of Syria’s civil war or the latest salvo in the struggle with Iran. It also suggests that the U.S.-Israel alliance may be returning to its Cold War roots—which is good news for both countries. - Eric from Bookmarklet