To The Point
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Jonathan Alter, author of “The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies,” talks about President Obama’s inability to schmooze on today’s “To the Point.”
From AP: An elementary school student suggests that guns should only shoot chocolate bullets. Biden responds.
The IRS’s Cincinnati branch made some terrible and damaging errors. But they were dealing with a real problem.
Good backgrounder on the IRS scandal
Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky on gun control.
How stupid does the Senate background-check vote look now, I ask the pundits and others who thought it was dumb politics for Obama and the Democrats to push for a vote that they obviously knew they were going to lose. I’d say not very stupid at all. The nosedive taken in the polls by a number of senators who voted against the bill, most of them in red states, makes public sentiment here crystal clear. And now, for the first time since arguably right after the Reagan assassination attempt—a damn long time, in other words—legislators in Washington are feeling political heat on guns that isn’t coming from the NRA. This bill will come back to the Senate, maybe before the August recess, and it already seems possible and maybe even likely to have 60 votes next time.
America’s 43rd President now has the country’s 13th presidential library. The George W. Bush Presidential Centerhouses the bullhorn from Ground Zero, the pistol from Saddam Hussein’s spider hole and a statue of two favorite dogs. How much is there on missing weapons of mass destruction or Wall Street bailouts? Do Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld or Karl Rove get much attention? Every president since FDR has a similar mix of historical fact and self-serving propaganda assembled on his behalf. We look at the contents, the architecture and the symbolism of Bush’s Center in Dallas and at the role of presidential libraries in our political life.
The detainees, after years of being quiet and waiting for the process to work itself out, with the Obama administration and so-forth, have come to realize that the process is jammed-up.
- Charlie Savage, Washington correspondent for the New York Times, on hunger strikes in Camp 6 at Guantanamo Bay Prison
“The point really is not whether you keep Guantanamo [Prison] open or keep it closed. The point is what you do with those you have there.”
- President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a research institute focusing on terrorism that was created in the wake of the attacks on September 11.
“Women’s rights now depend on their ZIP code,” according to Planned Parenthood, as more states pass restrictions and outright bans on abortion. Mississippi, Alabama, Kansas and North Dakota are closest to making abortion impossible – 40 years after Roe v. Wade declared it a constitutional right. Why do women want abortions? What happens when they can’t get them? What are the consequences when unwanted babies are born? Is the current movement about the politics of Red States, or a real effort to repeal Roe v. Wade?
“a study released Monday showed that media coverage of a woman candidate’s appearance actually makes people less likely to vote for her — even if the comments are positive.”
