I’m a fan of the original Star Trek and of the first Star Wars trilogy. I guess I dropped out after that, maybe moved on or something. But putting that aside, I love this Ruben Bolling. Sums up the cultural reference controversy and the sequester all in one.
During the oral arguments for Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts quoted some statistics that, according to his interpretation, showed the turnout ratio of minority voters to white voters was worse in Massachusetts than in any other state. This prompted a quick response from the Massachusetts election officials and a more measured one from Nate Silver on FiveThirtyEight. As the Chief Justice may be learning, statistics are tricky things.
The day after the remarks by the Chief Justice the Globe headline was
Chief justice blasted over Mass. voting ‘cheap shot’
Talk about feeling insulted! The nerve to compare us to Mississippi!
“Do you know which state has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American voter turnout?” Roberts asked Donald Verrilli Jr., solicitor general for the Department of Justice, during Wednesday’s arguments.
“I do not know that,” Verrilli answered.
“Massachusetts,” Roberts responded, adding that even Mississippi has a narrower gap.
Roberts later asked if Verrilli knew which state has the greatest disparity in registration. Again, Roberts said it was Massachusetts.
The problem is, Roberts is woefully wrong on those points, according to Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin, who on Thursday branded Roberts’s assertion a slur and made a declaration of his own. “I’m calling him out,” Galvin said.
Galvin was not alone in his view. Academics and Massachusetts politicians said that Roberts appeared to be misguided. A Supreme Court spokeswoman declined to offer supporting evidence of Roberts’s view, referring a reporter to the court transcript.
On Thursday, Galvin tried to set the record straight. “We have one of the highest voter registrations in the country,” he said, “so this whole effort to make a cheap-shot point at Massachusetts is deceptive.”
Map of Section 5 Covered Jurisdictions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So what’s going on here? Trust Nate Silver to explain.
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which is being challenged by Shelby County, Ala., in the case before the court, requires that certain states, counties and townships with a history of racial discrimination get approval (or “pre-clearance”) from the Department of Justice before making changes to their voting laws. But Chief Justice Roberts said that Mississippi, which is covered by Section 5, has the best ratio of African-American to white turnout, while Massachusetts, which is not covered, has the worst, he said.
Chief Justice Roberts’s statistics appear to come from data compiled in 2004 by the Census Bureau, which polls Americans about their voting behavior as part of its Current Population Survey. In 2004, according to the Census Bureau’s survey, the turnout rate among white voting-aged citizens was 60.2 percent in Mississippi, while the turnout rate among African-Americans was higher, 66.8 percent. In Massachusetts, conversely, the Census Bureau reported the white turnout rate at 72.0 percent but the black turnout rate at just 46.5 percent.
As much as it pleases me to see statistical data introduced in the Supreme Court, the act of citing statistical factoids is not the same thing as drawing sound inferences from them. If I were the lawyer defending the Voting Rights Act, I would have responded with two queries to Chief Justice Roberts. First, are Mississippi and Massachusetts representative of a broader trend: do states covered by Section 5 in fact have higher rates of black turnout on a consistent basis? And second, what if anything does this demonstrate about the efficacy of the Voting Rights Act?
Turns out that the Current Population Survey has a very high margin of error.
One reason to be suspicious of the representativeness of Mississippi and Massachusetts is the high margin of error associated with these calculations, as noted by Nina Totenberg of NPR.
Like other polls, the Current Population Survey is subject to sampling error, a result of collecting data among a random subsample of the population rather than everyone in the state. In states like Massachusetts that have low African-American populations, the margin of error can be especially high: it was plus-or-minus 9.6 percentage points in estimating the black turnout rate in 2004, according to the Census Bureau. Even in Mississippi, which has a larger black population, the margin of error was 5.2 percentage points.
The other problem is that the Chief Justice was using 2004 figures when the 2010 numbers had a lower margin of error. So what, if any thing can we conclude.
In the chart below, I have aggregated the 2004 turnout data into two groups of states, based on whether or not they are covered by Section 5. (I ignore states like New York where some counties are subject to Section 5 but others are not.) In the states covered by Section 5, the black turnout rate was 59.2 percent in 2004, while it was 60.8 percent in the states that are not subject to it. The ratio of white-to-black was 1.09 in the states covered by Section 5, but 1.12 in the states that are not covered by it. These differences are not large enough to be meaningful in either a statistical or a practical sense.
So did Chief Justice Roberts misconstrue the data? If he meant to suggest that states covered by Section 5 consistently have better black turnout rates than those that aren’t covered by the statute, then his claim is especially dubious. However, the evidence does support the more modest claim that black turnout is no worse in states covered by Section 5. There don’t seem to be consistent differences in turnout rates based on whether states are covered by Section 5 or not.
The bigger potential flaw with Chief Justice Roberts’s argument is not with the statistics he cites but with the conclusion he draws from them.
And here what Silver thinks we should be asking.
…the fact that black turnout rates are now roughly as high in states covered by Section 5 might be taken as evidence that the Voting Rights Act has been effective. There were huge regional differences in black turnout rates in the early 1960s, before the Voting Rights Act was passed. (In the 1964 election, for example, nonwhite turnout was about 45 percent in the South, but close to 70 percent elsewhere in the country.) These differences have largely evaporated now.
How much of this is because of the Voting Rights Act, as opposed to other voter protections that have been adopted since that time, or other societal changes? And even if the Voting Rights Act has been important in facilitating the changes, how many of the gains might be lost if the Section 5 requirements were dropped now?
To put it nicely, the Chief Justice is using correct statistics to come to not only the incorrect conclusion, but also to ask the wrong questions. Silver concludes
These are difficult questions that the Supreme Court faces. They are questions of causality – and as any good lawyer knows, establishing a chain of causality is often the most difficult chore in a case.
Statistical analysis can inform the answers if applied thoughtfully. But statistics can obscure the truth when they become divorced from the historical, legal and logical context of a case.
We can only hope that some law clerk at the Supreme Court reads FiveThirtyEight and talks to enough Justices. Given all the shenanigans going on in Section 5 covered and not covered states on voting rules, now is not the time to over turn this modest brake insuring voting rights.
Official 2005 photo of Chief Justice John G. Roberts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
No one cares about the sequester. Or maybe, no one knows about it. Or maybe everyone is just tired of Congress.
Here is Mike Luckovich today with a history of our recent financial crises.
Gee. I don’t know why you think all this is my fault.
No wonder the general public doesn’t care right now. And they probably won’t care until cuts start to hurt them. Let’s face it: both sides are using those old techniques of putting forward the arguments that make the best case for their point of view. The Republicans are right in that it won’t hurt for a little while – maybe a month or so. And the Democrats are right that this whole exercise is unnecessary and, in the long run not helpful to recovery.
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein who wrote the excellent book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks”, have an excellent piece in today’s Washington Post titled “Five myths about the sequester”.
1. Blame Obama — the sequester was his White House’s idea.
Identifying the origins of the sequester has become a major Washington fight. Bob Woodward weighed in recently with a Washington Post op-ed making the case that the idea began in the White House. He’s right in a narrow sense, mainly because he focuses on the middle of the 2011 negotiations between Obama and Republican lawmakers. If you look before and after, a different picture emerges.
In our view, what happened is quite straightforward: In 2011, House Republican leaders used their new majority to force their priorities on the Democratically controlled Senate and the president by holding the debt limit hostage to demands for deep and immediate spending cuts. After negotiations between Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner failed (Eric Cantor recently took credit for scuttling a deal), the parties at the eleventh hour settled on a two-part solution: immediate discretionary spending caps that would result in cuts of almost $1 trillion over 10 years; and the creation of a “supercommittee” tasked with reducing the 2012-2021 deficit by another $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion. If the supercommittee didn’t broker a deal, automatic spending cuts of $1.2 trillion over the next decade — the sequester — would go into effect. The sequester was designed to be so potentially destructive that the supercommittee would surely reach a deal to avert it.
The sequester’s origins can’t be blamed on one person — or one party. Republicans insisted on a trigger for automatic cuts; Jack Lew, then the White House budget director, suggested the specifics, modeled after a sequester-like mechanism Congress used in the 1980s, but with automatic tax increases added. Republicans rejected the latter but, at the time, took credit for the rest. Obama took the deal to get a debt-ceiling increase. But the president never accepted the prospect that the sequester would occur, nor did he ever agree to take tax increases off the table.
And of course no deal has been reached yet.
2. At least the automatic cuts will reduce runaway spending and begin to control the deficit.
What runaway spending? The $787 billion stimulus was a one-time expenditure that has come and gone. Under current law not including the sequester, non-defense discretionary spending as a share of the economy will shrink to a level not seen in 50 years. Defense spending grew substantially over the past decade, but that pattern has slowed and will soon end. Additional reductions must be achieved intelligently, tied to legitimate national security needs.
…
The annual budget deficit is projected to fall by almost 50 percent in 2013 compared with the height of the recession. Reducing the deficit over the long term requires going where the money is — boosting economic growth, controlling health-care costs and increasing revenue to handle the expense of an aging population. Deeper discretionary-spending cuts are counterproductive; immediate cuts, as Europe has made recently, could lead to a recession and bigger deficits.
I guess the Republicans want us to be like Greece after all.
And finally, one for the Democrats.
4. The cuts are so large, they will be catastrophic.
The administration has released state-by-state estimates of the sequester and highlighted the cutbacks most likely to harm or inconvenience the public. The reality is not so immediate or dramatic. The damage will accumulate in less visible ways, as irrational reductions in public spending impede economic growth and job creation; reduce investments in education, infrastructure and scientific research; and further disrupt the routines of a modern democracy. The longer the sequester remains in place, the more harm is inflicted.
So it may take a while to feel the cuts. Maybe long enough for the Obama Administration to submit a sensible budget that everyone can agree on. And no, I’m not smoking anything. Just counting on mayors and governors to continue to put the pressure on Congress.
I had never thought much about the impact of gun violence on my own life until I read Alex Kotlowitz’s piece in the New York Times Sunday Review. The story is about Chicago right now the worst urban area for gun violence, but what he describes could apply to anyone, any place. We talk a lot about the post traumatic stress of those who were in the movie theater in Aurora or the citizens of Newtown, but we don’t talk about the victims of the violence that happens every day one or two or three people at a time. And we certainly don’t talk about what happens to the rest of us.
I live in a neighborhood that is considered to be highly desirable. Rents have increased as houses have been renovated. Three families have been condoed. There are stories in the paper about the sales price of homes. But 20 years ago, there was a gang gun fight in front of our house. The bullet hole is still in one of the vestibule windows. A couple of years ago, a boy playing on one of the basketball courts, 4 or 5 blocks down the hill from us was shot and killed. I have friends who have lost children to violence. One can’t escape. All of this is somewhere in the back of my mind when I walk or drive in our relatively safe, desirable neighborhood. If I stop for a moment to think about violence, I think about my own neighborhood. And if I am affected in a relatively minor way, what about the children? This is the question that Kotlowitz asks.
EVERY year, the Chicago Police Department issues a report with the macabre title “Chicago Murder Analysis.” It’s a short but eye-opening document. Do the calculations and you realize that in the past 15 years, 8,083 people have been killed, most of them in a concentrated part of the city. There’s one particularly startling revelation that gets little notice: in 2011, more than four-fifths of all murders happened in a public place, a park, an alleyway, on the street, in a restaurant or at a gas station.
When Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old public school student and band majorette who just a week earlier had performed at President Obama’s inauguration, was killed on Jan. 29, she was standing under an awning in a park with a dozen friends. They all saw or heard it when she was shot in the back. One of them, in fact, was wounded by the gunfire. Which brings me to what’s not in the “Chicago Murder Analysis”: Over the past 15 years, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab, an estimated 36,000 people were shot and wounded. It’s a staggering number.
We report on the killers and the killed, but we ignore those who have been wounded or who have witnessed the shootings. What is the effect on individuals — especially kids — who have been privy to the violence in our cities’ streets?
The answer: post traumatic stress. Kotlowitz continues
I ask this somewhat rhetorically because in many ways we know the answer. We’ve seen what exposure to the brutality of war does to combat veterans. It can lead to outbursts of rage, an inability to sleep, flashbacks, a profound sense of being alone, a growing distrust of everyone around you, a heightened state of vigilance, a debilitating sense of guilt. In an interview I heard recently on the radio, the novelist and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien talked about how the atrocities and nastiness of battle get in your bones. The same can be said for kids growing up in Hadiya’s neighborhood.
The ugliness and inexplicability of the violence in our cities comes to define you and everyone around you. With just one act of violence, the ground shifts beneath you, your knees buckle and all you can do is try the best you can to maintain your balance. But it’s hard.
…
In December, the Department of Justice released a little-noticed report that suggested that children exposed to community violence might turn to violence themselves as “a source of power, prestige, security, or even belongingness.” The report went on to recommend that these children should be treated by professionals. At Hadiya Pendleton’s school, the principal said that over the Christmas holidays two students were shot and injured. If their experiences were at all typical, they were undoubtedly treated at a hospital emergency room and then released without any referral for counseling.
In Philadelphia, there’s a remarkable, albeit small, program, Healing Hurt People, a collaboration of Drexel University’s College of Medicine and School of Public Health, which scours two emergency rooms in the city for young men and teens who have been shot and pulls them in for counseling. When the program’s founder, Ted Corbin, was an emergency room doctor in Washington, D.C., he saw how shooting victims were treated and then sent back out on the streets, where, if they didn’t do injury to themselves, they’d most likely injure someone else. “If you don’t peel back some of the layers,” Mr. Corbin told me, “you don’t know how to stop that recycling of people.”
When the NRA talks about increasing mental health services instead of measures which might begin to stem the flood of guns, legal and illegally owned, washing over us, I don’t think they mean poor inner city kids. I don’t think they mean funding for more programs like Dr. Corbin’s. If they do, now is the time to speak out.
The basketball court where Jaewon Martin died.
The young boy who was shot on the basketball court down the hill from us was an honor student attending one of the best middle schools in Boston. Jaewon Martin died in 2010. According to the Boston Globe
A popular honor roll student, Martin would have graduated from the eighth grade at the James P. Timilty Middle School in Roxbury at the end of the school year.
Martin was well-liked and well-known by students and staff alike, and his family was very involved in the school, said Boston Public Schools spokesman Matthew Wilder.
“It’s a really tough day for the school community,” Wilder said.
Grief counselors will be on hand at the school to help students and faculty members cope with Martin’s death.
Was there any additional follow up after the initial counseling? What has happened to the other students in Martin’s class at Timilty or to others who knew him? Is there PTSD? Do we care?
I think this is the point of Kotlowitz’s story. We need to care.
As Tim O’Brien says, it gets in your bones. In the wake of Hadiya Pendleton’s shooting, we’ve talked about stiffer gun control laws, about better policing, about providing mentoring and after-school programs, all of which are essential. But missing from this conversation is any acknowledgment that the violence eats away at one’s soul — whether you’re a direct victim, a witness or, like Anita Stewart, simply a friend of the deceased. Most suffer silently. By themselves. Somewhere along the way, we need to focus on those left behind in our cities whose very character and sense of future have been altered by what they’ve experienced on the streets.
The answer to my title question is yes you are. If you don’t live somewhere violence happens with regularity, you are still affected because your future will be in some measure determined by these victims of violence.
Massachusetts has a minimum wage of $8/hour. This is fifth highest among states, sixth if you count the District of Columbia. According to the Boston Globe
Five years have elapsed since the minimum wage in Massachusetts increased in January 2008 to $8 an hour, still one of the highest wage floors in the country.
The Legislature has not voted on a minimum wage increase since 2006, when it phased in the increase over two years and overrode a veto by Governor Mitt Romney to do so.
Since then, four states, including Connecticut and Vermont and the District of Columbia have surpassed Massachusetts. Nevada requires employers to pay workers $8.25 an hour if they do not receive health benefits, but if health insurance is provided the minimum wage rate falls to $7.25.
California continues to pay workers a minimum of $8 an hour, and Washington has the highest minimum wage in the country at $9.19. Businesses in Connecticut must pay at least $8.25 an hour, and Vermont workers earn at least $8.60 an hour.
If Congress increases the minimum wage to $9, Massachusetts will automatically go to $9.10. Better, but not a livable wage if you live in Boston, where rents are high.
Even with an increase we will still need the Minimum Wage Awards.
PS. Did you happen to notice who vetoed the Massachusetts Minimum Wage increase?
This morning The Fix by Chris Cillizza included this interesting post by Aaron Blake. Blake posted four great graphics explaining the impact of the sequester. I am going to copy 2 of them here, but you should look at the entire post.
Blake explains
First up is Pew’s illustration of the year-by-year spending cuts that are included in the sequester. As you can see, the cuts start out relatively small — less than $75 billion in 2013 — but they grow to more than twice that size by 2021, for a total of more than $1 trillion.
The biggest growth in cuts over that time occurs in the interest payments, but everything except for mandatory spending cuts grow steadily over time.
And then there is this depressing news. Sequester will not have that big of a positive impact.
There has to be a better way. Maybe spend some money to put people back to work and let them pay taxes thus increasing revenue? And we do have to fix the tax code so Facebook executives actually pay taxes. And maybe we can cut programs and defense more selectively. This won’t be as dramatic, and it might be slower, but it will hurt fewer people.
Meanwhile, members of Congress of both parties are doing their best to keep funding for their own districts. Politico quotes Senator Lindsey Graham, an opponent of the sequester
I’m almost relishing the moment all these tough-talking guys say: ‘Can you help me with my base?’” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of the most vocal critics of the sequester, told POLITICO.
“When it’s somebody else’s base and district, it’s good government. When it’s in your state or your backyard, it’s devastating,” he added.
Of course Graham’s solution is to do away with the Affordable Care Act or Obama care. Is the momentum swinging toward a rational budget and solution? Probably not.
When I looked up sequestration in Merriam Webster, the closest meaning I could find to what is going on with the federal budget is
2a: a legal writ authorizing a sheriff or commissioner to take into custody the property of a defendant who is in contempt until the orders of a court are complied withb: a deposit whereby a neutral depositary agrees to hold property in litigation and to restore it to the party to whom it is adjudged to belong
What is the difference between the public debt and the deficit?
The deficit is the difference between the money Government takes in, called receipts, and what the Government spends, called outlays, each year. Receipts include the money the Government takes in from income, excise and social insurance taxes as well as fees and other income. Outlays include all Federal spending including social security and Medicare benefits along with all other spending ranging from medical research to interest payments on the debt. When there is a deficit, Treasury must borrow the money needed for the government to pay its bills.
We borrow the money by selling Treasury securities like T-bills, notes, Treasury Inflation-Protected securities and savings bonds to the public. Additionally, the Government Trust Funds are required by law to invest accumulated surpluses in Treasury securities. The Treasury securities issued to the public and to the Government Trust Funds (intragovernmental holdings) then become part of the total debt.
One way to think about the debt is as accumulated deficits.
So back when Bill Clinton balanced the budget, we did not run a deficit and did not accumulate more debt.
While some on the right would argue that Clinton really didn’t reduce the deficit and he ruined the economy by raising taxes, I seem to remember that things were going pretty well for the average person during the Clinton years.
When George W. came into office he said he wanted to give us taxpayers back our surplus which probably would have been OK if he hadn’t then started 2 wars which we didn’t raise taxes of any kind to pay for. No war bonds, no special tax assessment (used by state and local governments to pay for things), no general tax increase. Thus the red ink on the chart above. Then came what everyone is now calling the Great Recession. Barack Obama really had no choice but to spend money to get the economy moving again. We can argue about some of the spending – like saving some of the banks – but much of it work out pretty well, I think.
So now we have the sequester. This was a deal made in 2011 to keep everything from coming to a halt. I don’t think that anyone thought at the time that there wouldn’t be another budget deal to keep the cuts from going into effect, but so far no dice. The New York Times ran an editorial on Sunday which is the best explanation of what the cuts would mean that I have seen. For example:
NATIONAL SECURITY Two-week furloughs for most law-enforcement personnel will reduce Coast Guard operations, including drug interdictions and aid to navigation, by 25 percent. Cutbacks in Customs agents and airport security checkpoints will “substantially increase passenger wait times,” the Homeland Security Department said, creating delays of as much as an hour at busy airports. The Border Patrol will have to reduce work hours by the equivalent of 5,000 agents a year.
…
AIR TRAFFIC About 10 percent of the Federal Aviation Administration’s work force of 47,000 employees will be on furlough each day, including air traffic controllers, to meet a $600 million cut. The agency says it will be forced to reduce air traffic across the country, resulting in delays and disruptions, particularly at peak travel times.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE Every F.B.I. employee will be furloughed for nearly three weeks over the course of the year, the equivalent of 7,000 employees not working each day. The cut to the F.B.I. of $550 million will reduce the number of background checks on gun buyers that the bureau can perform, and reduce response times on cyberintrusion and counterterrorism investigations.
…
A three-week furlough of all food safety employees will produce a shortage of meat, poultry and eggs, pushing prices higher and harming restaurants and grocers. The Agriculture Department warns that public health could be affected by the inevitable black-market sales of uninspected food.
RECREATION National parks will have shorter hours, and some will have to close camping and hiking areas. Firefighting and law enforcement will be cut back.
DEFENSE PERSONNEL Enlisted personnel are exempt from sequester reductions this year, but furloughs lasting up to 22 days will be imposed for civilian employees, who do jobs like guarding military bases, handle budgets and teach the children of service members. More than 40 percent of those employees are veterans.
The military’s health insurance program, Tricare, could have a shortfall of up to $3 billion, which could lead to denial of elective medical care for retirees and dependents of active-duty service members.
And the list goes on.
The editorial concludes
Last week, Senate Democrats produced a much better plan to replace these cuts with a mix of new tax revenues and targeted reductions. About $55 billion would be raised by imposing a minimum tax on incomes of $1 million or more and ending some business deductions, while an equal amount of spending would be reduced from targeted cuts to defense and farm subsidies.
Republicans immediately rejected the idea; the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, called it “a political stunt.” Their proposal is to eliminate the defense cuts and double the ones on the domestic side, heedless of the suffering that even the existing reductions will inflict. Their refusal to consider new revenues means that on March 1, Americans will begin learning how austerity really feels.
Remember the definition of sequestration I began with? It is a temporary thing. The money is supposed to come back to us. If the sequestration cuts really happen, I can bet you they won’t be temporary. We are reaping the cost of wars most of us didn’t want and any rational solution will be held up by the same folks who did want to go to war. We should have had war bonds.
THE VICTORY FUND COMMITTEE CAN HELP YOUR MONEY WIN THIS WAR THROUGH INVESTMENT IN U.S. TREASURY SECURITIES SUITED TO… – NARA – 515674 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The President did not awkwardly reach for a bottle of water during his speech. In fact, I don’t remember him drinking at all. John Boehner, however, seemed to be sipping from his glass often. When he wasn’t looking dour, that is. I’ll write more about substance later, but this post is about impressions.
The best description of the Speaker is from Joan Walsh in Salon
But Boehner’s disdain was unrivaled. He also managed not to rise even for a shout-out to “wounded warriors,” or 102-year-old Deseline Victor, who waited seven hours to vote in Miami on Election Day. It was sometimes hilarious to watch him next to Vice President Joe Biden, who looked like a happy Easter Bunny with his white hair, lavender tie, pink-tinted glasses and green Newtown ribbon. Biden seemed to occasionally enjoy standing up, clapping while looking down at Boehner sulking in his chair.
This is what she means.
And then we can move on to Maureen Dowd on Marco Rubio.
The ubiquitous 41-year-old — who’s on the cover of Time as “The Republican Savior” — looked as if he needed some saving himself Tuesday night as he delivered the party’s response to the State of the Union address in English (and Spanish). He seemed parched, shaky and sweaty, rubbing his face and at one point lunging off-camera to grab a bottle of water.
Oh, that water lunge. How it will haunt poor Marco!
John Cassidy writing for the New Yorker, calls him “Water Boy”.
To be fair to Rubio, with a combination of eye contact and vigorous hand gestures, he was doing a decent job with the tough task of delivering a lengthy speech to a camera in an empty room. But then, for some reason—and it must have seemed like an urgent one to him—he decided to reach for a small plastic bottle on a nearby table and take a swig, thereby almost ducking out of the camera shot and sending the Twitterverse into hysterics. “Uh-oh. Water gulp—really bad TV optics,” Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia, tweeted. “SNL, Colbert, Stewart…here they come.” After that diversion, Rubio appeared to realize his error, and he looked a bit shaken. For some reason, the camera closed in on his face, which didn’t improve things. As the Democratic pundit Paul Begala cruelly noted on Twitter, the Senator was sporting a sheen of sweat that inspired memories of Richard Nixon.
Meanwhile, the President looked confident and sometimes very passionate as when he mentioned the need for Congress to vote on gun safety legislation.
The Republicans looked more like their leader.
That is Paul Ryan in the center.
For right now, the President has the upper hand. Neither Marco Rubio nor Rand Paul advanced any ideas beyond those from the last election – which they lost. Plus they presented a bad image all around. Maybe the Republicans are right in saying the President offered nothing new, nothing really that he didn’t talk about during the campaign, but there is a big difference: Barack Obama won based in large measure on those ideas. No wonder they look like four year olds being told they can’t have desert. And poor Marco. Only time will tell if he can overcome his reach for water.
Photographs AP/Charles Dharapak, Bill O’Leary/Post, Melina Mara/Post
Quick. Name the four responders to President Obama’s State of the Union/Joint addresses to Congress. (The first one is not considered to be formal State of the Union.) Give up? I could only remember Bobby Jindal and Bob McDonnell so I had to look them up.
2009 – Bobby Jindal in an address remembered for his Kenneth the Page imitation. If he ever decides to run for President, this will haunt him.
English: Governor Bobby Jindal at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
2010 – Bob McDonnell the governor of Virginia who tried to rectify Jindal’s mistakes by giving his speech in the Virginia State House before a live hand-picked audience. And then he became known as Governor Ultrasound and his Presidential chances disappeared.
2011 – Paul Ryan. Representative Ryan did run for higher office tied to Mitt and, as we know, they lost. He is young and maybe can run again someday if the Tea Party ever gains firm control over the Republican Party.
2012 – Mich Daniels, governor of Indiana. This was supposed to be a stepping stone to the Presidential nomination. Didn’t happen.
So this year we have Marco Rubio giving the response in English and in Spanish (so we are told). He is trying to position himself as the young, fresh face for a 2016 run for the Presidency. I have alread heard some Republican consultants saying he’s young and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are old and that is good for the Republicans. But State of the Union responders don’t have a very good track record, so we shall see.
English: Official portrait of US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Go to this link to see a short video of memorable moments.
I wish someone would explain to me what someone who was not even a government official at the time has to do with Benghazi? Is Chuck Hagel just leverage? Believe me, the Obama Administration could show live action footage of the event as it unfolded and the Republicans still wouldn’t be happy.
One Armed Services Committee member, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, has made clear that he considers Benghazi and Hagel to be one issue —“no confirmation without information,” he said Sunday, threatening to block both Hagel and CIA nominee John Brennan. Graham is demanding more details from the administration about its response to the Benghazi attacks, particularly the direct involvement of President Barack Obama.
And then you have James Inhofe. Again from Politico
A spokeswoman for Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) confirmed to POLITICO that he wanted to drag out the confirmation process for the former Republican senator from Nebraska.
Inhofe’s threat continued GOP brinksmanship that got under way on Sunday when Republican aides first said that some senators might walk out of a meeting that included a vote on Hagel. Inhofe and another top Republican on the committee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, both said Monday they would not walk out, but Inhofe repeated his vow to press the battle against Hagel.
It appears very much as if the Republicans have forgotten that they are a minority in the Senate. If Chair Senator Carl Levin calls for a committee vote, it will be along party lines which he didn’t want. But I don’t think there will be any bipartisan agreement there. According to the New York Times, Levin
…called Monday for a committee vote on Tuesday afternoon on the nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel to be the next secretary of defense.
The committee action has been postponed for the past week over evolving demands from Republicans for new documentation on Mr. Hagel’s past statements, personal financial records and even a sexual harassment allegation involving two former staff members, but not Mr. Hagel himself. As action has drawn closer, Republican opponents to a former Senate Republican colleague have threatened filibusters and even a walkout from the committee.
Once Hagel’s nomination reaches the floor, vote counters believe that there will be 60 votes to break any attempt at a filibuster. Maybe Majority Leader Reid need to reconsider his agreement with Senator McConnell since I don’t think it is going to work.
But Mr. Levin’s decision to call for a public discussion and vote, starting at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday ahead of President Obama‘s State of the Union address, indicated that the chairman still believes that Mr. Hagel has enough support to be confirmed. Committee aides say they have no indication that any Democrats or Senate independents will oppose him, putting him at 55 votes to start. Two Republican senators, Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Mike Johanns from Mr. Hagel’s home state, Nebraska, have pledged their support, and at least four Republicans have said they will oppose a filibuster.
And I still want to know what Chuck Hagel has to do with Benghazi, Senator Graham. I think we all know that this really has to do with the fact that Hagel is not a war hawk and will figure out a way to cut the defense budget.
Photograph Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
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