Jon Stewart: “It’s funny, I just made this movie about a guy who triumphs over the inhuman conditions in his imprisonment in an authoritarian country, and I don’t think they did half that shit to him.”
Reid Blames Obamacare Rollout for Democratic Losses
Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) told Politico that it was the bungled website and the rollout of the Affordable Care Act last fall that cost Democrats the majority and gave Republicans “ammunition to go after all of my candidates” — nothing else.
Said Reid: “We never recovered from the Obamacare rollout. I’m not going to beat up on Obama. The rollout didn’t go well. We never recovered from that.”
Asked about the lessons he drew from the losses, Reid paused for a second and said: “Have a better rollout of Obamacare.”
Lawmakers Agree to Raise Campaign Finance Limits
Capitol Hill lawmakers agreed on “a small provision to be added to the omnibus spending bill, allowing the two party committees to raise money for their presidential nominating conventions. The limit per donor would be $97,200 a year, on top of each party committee’s existing limit of $32,400 per year,” NPR reports.
“The $97,200-per-year year limit comes to $388,800 for a four-year presidential election cycle. If the new provision had been available in 2012, just 94 donors could have matched the public financing for both conventions. Or put another way – as the pro-regulation groups would – regular contributions and the new convention account would enable a donor and spouse to funnel more than $500,000 to a party each two-year congressional election cycle.”
[speech_bubble type=”std” subtype=”a” icon=”pwdome.jpg” name=””]There was not a single word of debate about the proposal. [/speech_bubble]
What Will Ted Cruz Do?
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) “faces a tough decision on whether to follow through on his pledge to block any legislation he deemed nonessential in the lame-duck session,” The Hill reports.
“With his colleagues scrambling to finish a $1 trillion government-funding measure and get out of town, Cruz is a wild card.”
Senate Democrats Have $20 Million in Debt
Santorum Gears Up for Another Campaign
The Washington Post says Rick Santorum is running for president again, even though he’s rarely mentioned with the other contenders.
Said Santorum: “America loves an underdog. We’re definitely the underdog in this race.”
“Where he had to build his operation from the ground up in 2012, Santorum now has a grass-roots operation called Patriot Voices, which boasts 150,000 activists across the country… Whether Santorum can raise the money he needs is another question. Foster Friess, the benefactor who ponied up $2.1 million to a pro-Santorum super PAC in 2012, says he would support him again. The former senator is sounding out other deep-pocketed donors, whom he declined to identify. He is retooling his message, hoping to appeal beyond his socially conservative base and reach blue-collar voters who are being left behind in the economy.”
Perry Says He’s Different This Time
Washington Post: “Rick Perry is trying to show that he is not the Rick Perry you remember. Gone, it seems, is the blustery bravado, the empty rhetoric, the cowboy boots — and, yes, the ‘oops’ moments. This Perry comes across as studious, contemplative and humble. He said he is at peace with his 2012 presidential campaign, in which his shoot-first-aim-later approach proved catastrophic, but is hungry to redeem himself.”
“As Perry packs his belongings at the governor’s mansion after 14 years in office, he is undergoing exhaustive preparations to run again for president in 2016. He is striving to make a better second impression than his first one.”
Congressional Leaders Reach Deal to Avert Shutdown
“Congressional leaders reached a deal Tuesday on a more than $1 trillion spending package that would fund most of the federal government through the current fiscal year,” the New York Times reports.
“But because negotiations on the package dragged over policy details, House lawmakers also prepared to move on a short-term spending measure that would avert a government shutdown if they cannot pass the larger bill by Thursday, when current funding expires.”
Bush Administration Paid $80M for Torture Consultants
“The CIA contractors who helped develop and operate the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that the agency used on terror suspects, including waterboarding, were paid more than $80 million,” NBC News reports.
“The contract was for more than $180 million, but the contractors had only received $81 million when their contract was terminated in 2009.”
Cheney Says Torture Report Is ‘Hooey’
Former Vice President Cheney admitted to the New York Times that he had not read the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report but “from news reports about it, he said he had heard nothing to change his mind about the wisdom and effectiveness of the program.”
Said Cheney: “What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it. I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.”
Bush Was Worried He’d Leak CIA Secrets
Here’s a curious note in the Senate’s report on torture pertaining to President George W. Bush:
“The presentation also noted that the President of the United States had directed that he not be informed of the locations of the CIA detention facilities to ensure that he would not accidentally disclose the information.”
[speech_bubble type=”std” subtype=”a” icon=”pwdome.jpg” name=””]What else did he prefer not to know? [/speech_bubble]
Gruber Apologizes for Remarks Over Obamacare
Jonathan Gruber, the health economist whose incendiary comments about “the stupidity of the American voter” have embarrassed the Obama administration, apologized for what he described as his “glib, thoughtless and sometimes downright insulting comments,” the New York Times reports.
Said Gruber: “I am not a political adviser nor a politician.”
Gruber also minimized his role, saying he had used an “economic microsimulation model” to help the administration and Democrats in Congress assess the impact of policies in the Affordable Care Act.
Should Democrats Give Up on the South?
Michael Tomasky: “With Landrieu’s departure, the Democrats will have no more senators from the Deep South, and I say good. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise. The Democrats don’t need it anyway.”
Harry Enten: “Most predictions of a ‘new normal’ in politics are fleeting — Karl Rove had plans for a permanent GOP majority in the early 2000s, and before that Republicans had a lock on the White House (until they didn’t) and Democrats had a lock on Congress (until they didn’t). Democratic extinction in the South isn’t likely to be any different.”
CIA Regularly Misled White House and Congress
A scathing report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that the CIA “routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained from the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects, and that its methods were more brutal than the C.I.A. acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public,” the New York Times reports.
The Washington Post notes the report “delivers new allegations of cruelty in a program whose severe tactics have been abundantly documented, revealing that agency medical personnel voiced alarm that waterboarding methods had deteriorated to ‘a series of near drownings’ and that agency employees subjected detainees to ‘rectal rehydration’ and other painful procedures that were never approved.”
The Daily Beast catalogs “the most gruesome” parts of the report and the Washington Post summarizes 20 key findings.
Bonus Quote of the Day
“Are you stupid?”
— Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), quoted by TPM, in his first question to MIT economist Jonathan Gruber at a hearing on Obamacare.
An Era of Parliamentary Elections in the U.S.
Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) defeat “is another reminder we have entered a period of parliamentary elections, where the parties stand for starkly different ideological agendas and where ticket-splitting, which follows from individual evaluations apart from party, is relatively rare,” Stu Rothenberg reports.
“In the end, the ‘Landrieu brand’ in Louisiana did not matter any more than the Pryor brand mattered in Arkansas or the Begich brand mattered in Alaska. Party labels mattered far more than the individual names of the candidates. Voters in all three states saw the incumbents’ Democratic label, and that made their decisions easy.”
Political Corruption Seen Highest in New Jersey, Arizona
A new Harvard study asked 280 reporters from every state except Louisiana — where none of the individuals contacted participated in the survey — to rate their perceptions of illegal and legal corruption in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of state government.
Newark Star Ledger: “Only in New Jersey and Arizona did the study find reporters perceived illegal corruption to be ‘very common’ in the executive branch. New Jersey’s legislative branch ranked as in between ‘moderately common’ and ‘very common’ for illegal corruption along with New Mexico and South Carolina, according to the study, which put 10 states in the ‘very common’ column for that category.”
Top GOP Tech Strategists Plotting for 2016
“The Republican Party’s top operatives — including strategists representing the Koch brothers’ political operation and several leading prospective 2016 presidential candidates – on Monday huddled behind closed doors to discuss how to synchronize their sometimes competing tech efforts,” multiple attendees confirmed to Politico.
