A bipartisan group of senators seems to think the president needs a nudge on Iran: “U.S. Senators Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) introduced a measure today that urges President Obama to impose tough new sanctions on the Iranian government if it fails to take tangible steps to abandon its nuclear ambitions by this fall.”
You almost get the idea business people think Democrats aren’t business-friendly: “The co-founder of Black Entertainment Television, Sheila Crump Johnson, endorsed Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Bob McDonnell on Monday.” And this, of course, makes Democratic insiders, who already had doubts about Creigh Deeds’s “ability to rally black voters,” nervous.
In New Jersey’s gubernatorial race, Chris Christie picks an attractive, female prosecutor as his running mate. Jon Corzine’s front-runner is the winner of The Apprentice TV show.
Deadlines are slipping everywhere. On health care: “With prospects slipping for Senate action on health care this month, House Democrats are lowering expectations that they will move their own version of a sweeping overhaul before taking off for a month long August recess.”
And on Guantanamo: “Senior administration officials said Monday that the report on detention will be delayed six months and the report on interrogation and transfer policy will be delayed two months.”
Greg Sargent gives Rep. Eric Cantor “credit” for baiting Obama into taking ownership of the economy.
Roger Clegg on Sotomayor’s questioning during the Second Circuit argument in Ricci: “The most instructive snippet is, ‘Counsel, we’re not suggesting that unqualified people be hired.’ . . . “We’re not suggesting . . . ? Who is that ‘we’? Has Judge Sotomayor climbed down from the bench and joined the defendants here . . . or has she joined them while staying on the bench?”
I couldn’t figure out why Obama would come up with such an unimpressive Supreme Court nominee. Neither can Richard Cohen: “From all we know, Sotomayor is no Scalia. She is no Thurgood Marshall, either, or even a John Roberts, who is leading the court in his own direction. She will be confirmed. But if she is not, liberalism will not have lost much of a champion or a thinker. A million lawyers in America and something Jimmy Carter used to say comes to mind: Why not the best?”
Bill McGurn gets it right: “Six months into the president’s term, you don’t read much about this post-partisan future anymore. It may be because on almost every big-ticket legislative item (the stimulus, climate change, and now health care), Mr. Obama has been pushing a highly ideological agenda with little (and in some cases zero) support from across the aisle. Yet far from stating the obvious — that sitting in the Oval Office is a very partisan president — the press corps is allowing Mr. Obama to evade the issue by coming up with novel redefinitions.”
From Brookings’s William Gale: “Choosing to finance health care reform by taxing the rich is bad economic policy, bad health policy, bad budget policy and poor leadership.” (h/t Greg Mankiw) Actually, one need look no farther than California and New Jersey to see what happens when a slim strata of taxpayers are tasked with paying for huge government programs. To quote Margaret Thatcher, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
As some suspected, doctors around the country aren’t pleased with the AMA’s endorsement of ObamaCare: “[A] coalition of state medical associations and specialty organizations is breaking from the country’s largest physicians’ group to mount its own push against the inclusion of a public insurance option in any overhaul bill . . . The draft letter, written by members of the Medical Association of Georgia, says flatly that the physicians’ groups unequivocally oppose a government-administered insurance plan, as well as use of government-funded effectiveness tests, or ‘comparative effectiveness research,’ to dictate which medical procedures should be eligible for coverage.”
Did Pelosi put her members at risk over a cap-and-trade bill that may never see the light of day in the Senate? “Freshman Rep. Tom Perriello of Virginia is a test case for whether President Barack Obama’s energy agenda will help or hurt vulnerable Democrats in next year’s midterm elections. The Democrat’s June 26 vote for the sweeping climate bill that aims to reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases put him in the cross hairs of an aggressive Republican advertising campaign also targeting 13 other House Democrats. The GOP accuses these Democrats of exposing their constituents to higher energy costs and putting jobs at risk.”
