Matt Bai says small money donors are the real problem with politics. Does he prove this is the case? Of course not -- that would require more than anecdotes about breathless fundraising emails and "most shared" lists. It would require, for example, Mr. Bai to demonstrate that small money outraises big money (which he can't, because it doesn't). And never does Mr. Bai consider the more obvious explanation: that establishment politicians use extremists to get things done they could never get done on their own. If he did that, he'd have a much harder time telling us it's all our fault.
The Intercept reveals that some 40% of Americans on our government's "Terrorist Screening Database" have "no recognized terrorist group association." We also learn that our government's no-fly list has expanded greatly under President Obama, that the city with the "second-highest concentration" of folks in the database just so happens to have the largest Arab-American population in the country, and that folks often find their way to the database through a sort of gateway database, if you will, that fingers folks for suspicion based on even less evidence than the TSD does. It should go without saying that a putative terrorist-watching database with so much fat would have problems catching real terrorists.
Citizens for Tax Justice explains the problem with using the principle of "dynamic scoring" to argue that tax cuts raise revenues. If the words "dynamic scoring" don't already pin your BS detector to the red, you will learn that the right's argument for "dynamic scoring" is based on the premise that tax cuts will lead to better behavior, which will in turn lead to more revenue. But does "better behavior" explain the lower revenue and massive cuts to public services good Kansans are experiencing right now at the hands of Gov. Brownback's tax cut "experiment"?
Another day, another dilemma with horns sharp enough to impale Rand Paul and his Presidential ambitions: Republicans can't go all Libertarian on gay marriage, he says, because look at all the Republicans who signed up for the party based on social issues, and you can't just ignore them. The GOP can't just "completely flip," he says, but you're either for gay marriage or against it; he seems to want the Party to be both and neither.
Finally, some bad news: Missouri's "right to farm befoul your water and let Frankenfood seeds blow over onto organic farms and spray carcinogens on your food" has, apparently, passed, albeit narrowly. And who puts a state constitutional amendment to a vote during a primary, versus a general election? Someone who wants to stack the vote, that's who. Take heart in the fact that they stacked the vote and still damn near lost.
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