Politics
Democrats
Why Democrats are optimistic about cooperating with Republicans. "The hope among Dems is that this episode has driven home to some GOP lawmakers that they really do face a stark choice between completely giving up on basic governing and finally finding a way to work with the president; that this choice isn’t going away; and that the former option is not tenable over the long term. Along these lines, the fact that other GOP senators are joining McCain in balking at the Tea Party bloc has given Dems a bit of optimism that at a certain point, there is a sizable contingent of Republican lawmakers out there that knows that its current posture can’t hold forever." Greg Sargent at the Plum Line.
Jerry Brown's political reboot. "California has once more led the way for the nation ... That California’s broken government is still functioning is largely because Jerry Brown has spent his life studying its machinery. ... Brown had the advantage of having already been through eight budget cycles. From his years as mayor, he knew the budget tricks ... From the many campaigns he had won, and lost, he had learned the difference between fights that were tough but winnable, like the push to pass Proposition 30, and those that mean certain defeat, like challenging California’s direct-democracy system." James Fallows at the Atlantic.
Elections
Things are getting dirty in Massachusetts. "The Republican nominee for Senate in Massachusetts called his opponent, longterm Congressman Ed Markey, 'dirty and low' and 'pond scum' during an interview ... Gomez was being asked by a reporter about his new ad 'Something New' which alleges Ed Markey compared Gomez to terrorist Osama Bin Laden and blamed him for the Newtown shooting. Gomez’s ad has been criticized by fact checkers from the Boston Globe and FactCheck.org." Andrew Kaczynski at Buzzfeed.
Financial Regulation
Financial lobbyists are a little too involved in writing legislation for my taste. "Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens financial regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves. One bill that sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month — over the objections of the Treasury Department — was essentially Citigroup’s, ... The bill would exempt broad swathes of trades from new regulation. ... Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word. (Lawmakers changed two words to make them plural.)" Eric Lipton and Ben Protess at the New York Times.
Fiscal Fights
The GOP budget wars continue. "Senate Republicans are warring over the budget, creating rifts between the old and new guards, the mainstream and the tea party and Sens. John McCain and Ted Cruz. ... With Cruz as the ringleader, a handful of Senate conservatives are refusing to consent to budget negotiations with the House, instead engaging in open combat with more senior Republicans like McCain who are perplexed at their hardball tactics." Manu Raju and Ginger Gibson at Politico.
GOP
What's behind the wave of conservative wonks abandoning the Republican party? The retreat from policymaking. "Over the last few years, the Republican Party has been retreating from policy ground they once held and salting the earth after them. This has coincided with, and perhaps even been driven by, the Democratic Party pushing into policy positions they once rejected as overly conservative. The result is that the range of policies you can hold and still be a Republican is much narrower than it was in, say, 2005. That’s left a lot of once-Republican wonks without an obvious political home." Ezra Klein at Wonkblog.
John McCain vs. the GOP. "McCain is displaying increasing signs of agitation with the ideological currents driving his party. His journey from orthodox Republican to the left edge of his party and back may have one more reversal yet. ... McCain’s disagreement over what appears to be a technical point of Senate process is actually a fundamental split over the party’s approach toward Obama. The conservatives want to continue their stance of total opposition and instigating crises — the stance that has defined the party throughout the Obama era — while McCain wants to engage in compromise and negotiation." Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine.
Bachmann is back. "Bachmann has made a sweeping claim: the 'most personal, sensitive, intimate, private health-care information is in the hands of the IRS' under the health-care law. There is no evidence to support this assertion, and she is simply scaring people when she repeats it on television. Bachmann thus continues her record-breaking streak of outlandish claims." Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post.
Guns
Still plenty of public support for gun safety reforms. "81% of Americans support broader background checks on firearm purchases ... What's more, ... 81% of self-identified Republicans support background checks for private gun sales, too." Steve Benen at Maddowblog.
Health
Check out the ACA working successfully in California. "Predictions of an Obamacare apocalypse seem a little less credible today, thanks to California. Officials ... offered the first detailed glimpse of what consumers buying health benefits on their own can expect to pay next year. ... These consumers will be getting a pretty good deal. ... The majority of Californians buying coverage on the state's new insurance exchange will be paying less ... than they would pay for equivalent coverage today. ... All of these consumers will have access to the kind of comprehensive benefits that are frequently unavailable today, at any price, because of the way insurers try to avoid the old and the sick." Jonathan Cohn at the New Republic.
Train wreck? Certainly not. "Fundamentally Affordable Care Act implementation is going to work out great, and people are going to love it. The latest evidence comes to us today from California ... Their exchanges are getting set up, and it looks like premiums for 'silver' and 'bronze' plans are both going to be lower than was previously expected. Far from a 'train wreck,' ... the biggest single set of clients for the program is getting something like a nice, smooth high-speed train ride. ... The Affordable Care Act's goal of slowing the growth in aggregate health expenditures is also coming true." Matthew Yglesias at Slate.
This carries political implications for the GOP. "The preliminary numbers for CA are in ... with costs coming in below expectations. ... Think about the political dynamics. Because the Supreme Court decided to let states opt out of the Medicaid expansion, some states — notably Texas — will have a pretty dysfunctional version of Obamacare in 2014 ... The whole political calculus was supposed to be that Republicans in red states could point to the horrors of Obamacare and ride them to political victory. Instead, it looks as if we’re going to see blue-state residents reaping the benefits of a functional health care system, while red-state residents are denied many of those benefits." Paul Krugman at the New York Times.
Are American doctors overpaid? "Standard economic theory suggests that ... American doctors are overpaid ... At existing incomes there is still considerable excess demand for places in medical schools among bright American youngsters – not to mention a huge pool of highly qualified foreign applicants. This suggests that the lamented doctor shortage in the United States is the result of an artificially constrained supply of medical school places and residency slots, which serves to inflate physician incomes above what they would be in a better functioning market without supply constraints." Uwe Reinhardt at Economix.
Immigration
Immigration reform could take several paths, but not all lead to success. "Even if the bill passes the Senate, it has a long way to go before it might hit President Obama’s desk. The reform bill the Senate took up in 2006 passed with 62 votes, only to go nowhere in the House. So, how is the Gang of Eight deal going to pass? And what could sink it? Here are two plausible routes to success and three ways the bill could fall short." Dylan Matthews at Wonkblog.
Healthcare fights are still holding up an agreement in the House. "For the second time in two weeks, House lawmakers in both parties emerged from a closed negotiation with a tentative agreement to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws. But now they have to put those ideas into text, when that accord could all fall apart. ... The House’s bipartisan group has struggled to wrap up its legislation, mostly because the two parties trying to figure out how to ensure that undocumented immigrants don’t take advantage of government health care subsidies." Jake Sherman and Seung Kim at Politico.
LGBT Rights
The ENDA has stalled until July. "LGBT advocates ... will have to wait until after the Fourth of July holiday to see any action on another top priority: a bill to ban workplace discrimination against LGBT people. ... 'I think we’re going to do ENDA probably after the Fourth of July break,' Sen. Tom Harkin, the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that is considering the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, told BuzzFeed this week. Supporters had hoped to see the bill move out of the committee by June at the latest." Chris Geldner at Buzzfeed.
Scandals
Is the GOP's popularity problem why the scandals don't seem to be sticking? "Americans may not be ecstatic about President Obama and his policies, but compared with the Republicans, they think Obama doesn’t look so bad. This might partly explain why, even with all of the controversies engulfing the Obama administration these days, the president doesn’t appear to be hurt at all, at least as measured by job-approval ratings." Charlie Cook in the National Journal.
SCOTUSwatch
Will the appointments case make it onto next year's docket? "A Washington State business joined the Obama administration on Thursday in urging the Supreme Court to clarify when presidents can constitutionally fill government vacancies when the Senate is taking a recess, but asked the Court to rule in a way that would definitely scuttle the specific appointments that are at issue in the case. ... Last month, the administration and the National Labor Relations Board challenged in the Court a ruling in January by the D.C. Circuit that struck down President Obama’s 2012 appointments to the Board. That filing argued that the decision 'would dramatically curtail' the president’s appointments power." Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog.
Tax Reform
The case for getting rid of corporate taxes. "The best way to reform corporate taxation isn't to cut the rate but abolish it. A wide consensus of economists and tax experts finds it to be bad policy. Nobody... thought that corporate taxes were a smart or efficient way for governments to raise revenue. Economic theory provides no strong argument for special taxation of corporate income, at whatever rate." Evan Soltas at Bloomberg.
War on Terror
Obama's six point plan to end the War on Terror. Timothy Lee at Wonkblog.
South Carolina might host the next set of trials for Guantanamo detainees. "President Obama ... announced initial steps his administration will take in a renewed effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison ... And a senior administration official told the Wall Street Journal that a leading candidate for military commissions — which are currently being held at Guantanamo — is the Naval Brig at Charleston, S.C." Think Progress.
The DOD now has lead responsibility for the drone program. "The White House has quietly shifted lead responsibility for its controversial armed drone program from the CIA to the Defense Department ... At issue is a months-long debate about whether the CIA should remain the lead organization for planning and conducting aerial strikes on al-Qaida targets from remotely piloted aircraft. The Obama administration appears to have settled that debate, opting to hand the military control of most drone strikes while returning the CIA to its core missions of collecting and analyzing intelligence." John Bennett at Defense News.
International
Global
Where the world's atheists live. "There’s surprisingly little data available on the subject. But a 2012 poll by WIN/Gallup International ... asked more than 50,000 people in 40 countries whether they considered themselves 'religious,' 'not religious' or 'convinced atheist.' Overall, the poll concluded that roughly 13 percent of global respondents identified as atheists, more than double the percentage in the U.S. The highest reported share of self-described atheists is in China: an astounding 47 percent." Max Fisher and Caitlin Dewey at the Washington Post.
Asia
China has drones. Now what? "Drones, able to dispatch death remotely, without human eyes on their targets or a pilot’s life at stake, make people uncomfortable ... An even more alarming prospect is that unmanned aircraft will be acquired and deployed by authoritarian regimes ... Those worried about exactly that tend to point their fingers at China. ... Indeed, the time to fret about when China and other authoritarian countries will acquire drones is over: they have them. The question now is when and how they will use them. But as with its other, less exotic military capabilities, Beijing has cleared only a technological hurdle -- and its behavior will continue to be constrained by politics." Andrew Erickson and Austin Strange in Foreign Affairs.
And China's gender gap is becoming more entrenched. "Mao declared his commitment to gender equality ... But the state-imposed equal employment of women and men failed to transform underlying gender relations. ... China fired tens of millions of workers at state-owned enterprises in the 1990s ... Women were fired disproportionately over men. ... Women were rehired later at much lower rates than men who were fired. ... Around the same time, a 'Women Return to the Home' movement emerged, calling on women to quit their jobs to make way for men in a time of rising unemployment. Over the years, these attitudes have taken hold: There has been a resurgence of belief in traditional gender roles." Leta Fincher in the New York Times.
Europe
Germany is the most popular country in the world. "Germany is the most positively viewed nation in the world in this year's annual Country Ratings Poll for the BBC World Service. More than 26,000 people were surveyed internationally for the poll. They were asked to rate 16 countries and the European Union on whether their influence in the world was 'mainly positive' or 'mainly negative'. Germany came out top, with 59% rating it positively." BBC.
Science
12 technologies that will drive our economic future. "The single biggest takeaway from the study is this: The things that will have the greatest impact on the economy in the medium term aren’t the ones that seem to most excite the imagination and public interest. Instead, the potentially powerful innovations are mostly those that have been evolving for many years in new ways." Neil Irwin at Wonkblog.
Reflections on language and thought. "The answer to the question of whether thought is possible without language depends on what you mean by thought. Can you experience sensations, impressions, feelings without language? Yes, and very few would argue otherwise. But there is a difference between being able to experience, say, pain or light, and possessing the concepts "pain" and "light." Most would say true thought entails having the concepts." Arika Okrent at Mental Floss.
Reflections on language and thought. "The answer to the question of whether thought is possible without language depends on what you mean by thought. Can you experience sensations, impressions, feelings without language? Yes, and very few would argue otherwise. But there is a difference between being able to experience, say, pain or light, and possessing the concepts "pain" and "light." Most would say true thought entails having the concepts." Arika Okrent at Mental Floss.
Cockroaches are outsmarting us all. "In the ongoing battle between humans and cockroaches, the insects have a leg up. A new study finds that roaches evolved their taste buds to make sweet insecticide baits taste bitter. As a result, the roaches avoid the baits and thrive, to the frustration of homeowners everywhere." Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience.
Miscellaneous
31 charts that will restore your faith in humanity. Rob Wile at Business Insider.
Same charts, different spin: 31 charts that will 'destroy' your faith in humanity. Brad Plumer at Wonkblog.
11 terrifying images of old Soviet playgrounds. Ransom Riggs at Mental Floss.
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