Aides to Hillary Clinton tell Politico the former Secretary of State has a “default” policy of rejecting all Sunday political show interview requests.
Said one: “She has a standing refusal… She hates them. She would rather die than do them. The White House knows, so they would know not to even ask her.”
A new Rocky Mountain Poll in Arizona finds 55% of voters now favor legalizing same-sex marriage, while just 35% said they are opposed.
The Hill: “Senate Democrats frustrated with the GOP’s blocking of a string of
President Obama’s nominees are seriously weighing a controversial tactic
known as the ‘nuclear option.’ The option — which would involve
Democrats changing Senate rules through a majority vote to prevent the
GOP from using the 60-vote filibuster to block nominations — was raised
during a private meeting Wednesday involving about 25 Democratic
senators and a group of labor leaders.”
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First Read: “While the president’s defiant tone on Benghazi probably would have been enough to quell things under normal circumstances, the times aren’t normal right now. The rule of three (toss in IRS and AP) means the president’s credibility is truly on the line right now with the public. No amount of denial or outrage will be as persuasive to the public right now and the president’s political foes know it. And that’s why you saw some senators yesterday going even further, hitting the White House on the implementation of health care or Mitch McConnell who attempted to use the IRS news to connect the dots and claim a concerted effort was taking place all over the government to target conservatives or limit freedoms. Many of these charges are baseless but the environment right now for the White House is a mess and they are in a position where it’ll be a lot easier for issues to stick to them. The Teflon is wearing off.”
Jill Lawrence wonders whether the drama “could be dramatic enough to move even the phlegmatic Obama
administration to action. Three concurrent scandals or controversies are
just too many. Could that mean we will be bidding farewell soon to
Attorney General Eric Holder?”
The Daily Mail has the 55 questions the IRS asked one tea party group including demands for names of all its donors and volunteers.
New Yorker: “If the three-strikes rule were in effect, President Obama would be heading for the dugout, bat in hand. First the alleged Benghazi cover-up, then the kerfuffle about the I.R.S. targeting conservative groups, and now the revelation that earlier this year the Justice Department secretly seized two months of phone records involving editors and reporters at the Associated Press.”
“Among the many questions that the phone-records story raises are these two very basic ones: What were they thinking? And who, precisely, were they?”
The Week: Why did the Obama administration spy on the Associated Press?
Jon Stewart skewered the IRS for targeting conservative groups and bashed President Obama for validating the “tinfoil behatted.”
The Week: “For all the grief Jon Stewart gives conservatives on The Daily Show, there are some nights he hands them a must-watch gift.”
“If he were a woman, they’d be calling him the weakest speaker in history.”
— House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), quoted by the Huffington Post, on Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) hasn’t picked a new Lieutenant Governor — and it’s not yet clear he will — but he told WFLA-AM that former Rep. Allen West (R-FL) “would make a superb choice” and would be”a great Lieutenant Governor.”
“Scott has said he would wait until the end of the session before working on finding someone to replace Jennifer Carroll, who resigned earlier this year after being questioned about an indicted charity that ran internet cafes. Her resignation was soon followed by the passage of a law banning those businesses in Florida. ”
Sen. Mike Crapo’s (R-ID) former campaign manager “blames his friend for investing $250,000 from donors in a Las Vegas company amid the 2008 global financial crisis, part of a scheme intended to pay off within two months,” the AP reports.
“Crapo’s former manager, Jake Ball, said in a sworn affidavit Crapo gave him the latitude to seek higher returns for campaign cash, though Crapo said he had no knowledge of this investment until the money was gone.”
Boston Globe: “They are career politicians and neophytes, influential community organizers and persistent gadflies, radio station founders and a justice of the peace. They are almost entirely men and come disproportionately from a handful of neighborhoods, West Roxbury, Hyde Park, and Dorchester. The next mayor of Boston will be one of the two dozen people who signed up for nomination papers by the deadline Monday. Time has run out for any last-minute surprises.”
“Sounding at once hopeful and deadly serious about the city he’s trying to turn around, emergency manager Kevyn Orr said Monday he’ll know in as soon as six weeks — after good-faith talks with creditors, unions and others — whether Detroit’s financial meltdown can be resolved outside of a municipal bankruptcy,” the Detroit Free Press reports.
Said Orr: “We’ll get a gauge on whether we have a true partner for an out-of-court solution in that sort of time frame.”
Journalists called the news the Justice Department seized records from phone lines assigned to Associated Press offices and its reporters over a two month period “chilling” and a “dragnet to intimidate the media,” Politico reports.
President Obama said “those responsible for any improper scrutiny of conservative groups’ tax status would be held ‘fully accountable,’ hours before it emerged that the current and former heads of the Internal Revenue Service were informed last May that tea-party groups had been targeted,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The IRS said in a statement that acting Commissioner Steven Miller was first told by the agency staff on May 3, 2012, that some specific groups’ applications for tax-exempt status were improperly selected for extra scrutiny based on their names.”
The Washington Post reports “officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved with investigating conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed.”
The Week: 4 scandalous elements of the IRS debacle.
Ben Smith: “President Obama, elected with the new technology of microtargeting, is now in danger of a new perception: That he’s the president of microtargeted drone warfare and government surveillance. This is a different critique from the loud and ultimately unpersuasive one Republicans have long made, that initiatives like a health care overhaul, tax increases, and background checks for gun buyers represent a broad, unprecedented, and out-of-control new assertion of power by the American government. The power Obama is now under fire for asserting isn’t broad: It is narrow, even personal. Specific groups and individual reporters were targeted by extremely powerful government agencies.”
Pablo Pantoja, who was most recently the State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach for the Republican National Committee, changed his voter registration to become a Democrat, according to Florida Nation.
Writes Pantoia: “It doesn’t take much to see the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today. I have wondered before about the seemingly harsh undertones about immigrants and others. Look no further; a well-known organization recently confirms the intolerance of that which seems different or strange to them.”
Michelle Cottle says Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) “possess a key similarity: an abundance of old-school manliness. Sure, one is a twangy Texan with that shit-kicking, boot-wearing thing going on (despite being a double-ivied, cosmopolitan kind of guy). The other is a Jersey bruiser, with a (much-discussed) physique reminiscent of Tony Soprano after a doughnut bender. But both are delivering a booster shot of testosterone to the GOP in a way few have managed to pull off of late.”
“I’m not talking here about the complex embodiment of modern masculinity or what it means to be the platonic ideal of a man. Today’s politics have no place for such high-minded analysis. No, this is about which conservative leaders ooze a stereotypical, gut-level manliness. Swagger. That hard-to-define-but-easy-to-recognize machismo that no amount of therapy, media training, or psycho-pharmaceuticals can impart.”
“After about 4 hours of debate, the Minnesota Senate has voted 37-30 to approve a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in the state,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.
“The House approved the measure 75-59 last Thursday. The bill will now head to Gov. Mark Dayton (D), who is likely to sign it into law Tuesday. If he does, that would make Minnesota the 12th state to legalize same-sex marriage.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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