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Had the best of intentions, but slept something like 18 hours today (even the cat's impressed at my feline behavior). Hopefully I'll be well enough to type by Monday. Have a good weekend, everyone, and stay healthy!
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
Due to illness, there will be no column today, sorry. Can't think straight, no energy. I'll try to get a Friday column out tomorrow, but no promises.
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
The 1828 presidential campaign was one of the most vicious in all of American history. While campaigning on what would today be called populism (complete with a "Let the people rule" slogan), Andrew Jackson was called a nothing short of a "jackass" by his opponents. Jackson, in a feat of political jiu-jitsu, then embraced the jackass label as his own. This is why, today, the Democratic Party is often represented by an image of a jackass (which is usually euphemistically referred to as a "donkey"). This historical introduction is necessary to put Speaker John Boehner's recent comments regarding Senate Democrats into context and perspective.
The current congressional fight isn't even really one between the two parties, but rather between House Republicans and Senate Republicans. This basic fact isn't going to stop Republicans from both chambers from attempting to throw all the blame -- for their own inadequate grasp of basic math (counting votes) and their own lack of a basic understanding of how bills become laws -- onto the Democrats. When asked about the next step for Republicans in their windmill-tilting over the Department of Homeland Security funding and President Obama's new immigration policy, Boehner tried to shift the blame elsewhere, responding: "Why don't you go ask the Senate Democrats when they're going to get off their ass and do something other than to vote no?"
While the fight for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination is already fiercely heating up, over on the Democratic side there is really only one question even being asked right now -- when will Hillary Clinton formally declare her candidacy? Will she wait until summer, or throw her hat in the ring during the spring? Whenever she does launch her campaign, she will inevitably face the same problem she grappled with the last time she ran. Call it her inevitability problem (or maybe her "inevitable inevitability problem," if you're trying to come up with a clever headline).
In 2008, Clinton's biggest flaw heading into primary season was that she began believing her own press releases about how she'd have the whole contest wrapped up by Super Tuesday. She'd easily brush off the upstart Obama, and then quickly pivot to her general election strategy. This, to put it mildly, did not come to pass exactly as Team Clinton foresaw it. It turns out she wasn't as inevitable as she had thought (she was more "evitable," perhaps?).
Roy Moore, the chief justice of Alabama's state supreme court, is making a stand in the courthouse door. This is not literally happening, the way it did back in 1963 when Alabama's Governor George Wallace made a similar stand in the schoolhouse door. But the motivation is similar; a classic standoff between states' rights and federal legal supremacy over state law. In both Moore's and Wallace's cases, high Alabama officials are defying federal civil rights legal orders -- and the United States Supreme Court -- to preserve the state's ability to legally discriminate against a segment of its population.
I will be running a few live tests this weekend, updating the site's code. There may be temporary interruptions of service, which may result in you getting incomprehensible "error messages" instead of seeing the site. I apologize for these in advance, should this happen to you. I'm working hard to update some things behind the scenes here (things that won't change what you see, but rather how the site operates internally), so I apologize in advance for any inconvenience you may experience this weekend.
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams (or, as we affectionately refer to him, "BriWi") was ruthlessly mocked online this week, after a war story he told turned out to be a complete fabrication. Our headline today refers to the funniest mockery we've yet seen on the subject, titled "That one live shot I did from the moon," for no other reason than it makes a funny headline. We really have no news to report from the moon, although (as usual) there are quite a few bits of lunacy to report from the political world. As for BriWi, well, we'll see what happens next. Perhaps it's time to give Lester Holt a shot at the big chair? It's a little hard to feel too sorry for BriWi, since he reportedly rakes in $10 million a year to read the news to America every night. Nice work if you can get it, eh? Or hold onto it, for that matter.
Speaking of jobs, there's a new jobs report out and it has some pretty amazing good news. But we'll have much more on that a bit later, down in the talking points.
To be more literal than metaphorical, that headline should really read something like "...Doesn't Crash And Burn" or maybe "...Misremembers Crashing And Burning." One can only imagine what the late-night comedy jokes are going to be like, starting tonight. On Twitter, Williams is already being lampooned to hilarious effect (best one I've seen so far: "That one live shot I did from the moon"). The big question is whether he'll be able to keep his job now or not, seeing as how he has damaged his own credibility -- possibly beyond repair -- with his embellishment of his Iraq War story of being in a helicopter shot down by enemy fire.
What Brian Williams revealed last night on NBC's Nightly News was that this event, in fact, did not happen. Or, at the very least, did not happen the way he'd been telling the story. The military newspaper Stars And Stripes broke this story after interviewing the actual people who were on the helicopter in question, which did not actually contain Brian Williams during the event. Williams (or "BriWi," as he is affectionately known around here) arrived 30-60 minutes later (accounts vary) and interviewed the people who were on the chopper -- and then at some later date convinced himself, within his own mind, that he was actually on board when the attack happened.
Republicans in Congress have, once again, successfully painted themselves into a corner. Even though they've done exactly this previously (in exactly the same way), they now have absolutely no idea how to get out of this dilemma (which they created for themselves). They've got a few weeks to figure something out, but at the moment it appears they have no clue. That's not just liberal snark talking, either. I've seen multiple Republicans interviewed in the past few days and they all universally offer up some form of: "We have no idea what plan B will be."
Plan A was supposed to be: "Republicans magically make Obama back down on his new immigration policy." Now that's pure liberal snark talking, I will admit. But it's hard to avoid such delicious irony when writing on the subject of how Republicans have been hoist on yet another one of their own petards. In fact, this sweet irony cake is even multi-layered, so all it requires is a little icing before slicing up and serving to all who hunger for that sort of thing. First, there's the irony of the Republicans demanding -- and, indeed, fighting hard for -- a deadline that they are now afraid to use as leverage (because they know it will end badly if they do). There's the irony of Mitch McConnell on deck as the scapegoat for angry House Republicans (replacing Harry Reid as the favored object of their ire). But the biggest irony of all is seeing Republicans attempt to hold hostage the one part of the federal budget that they all normally support wholeheartedly. How, one wonders, did Republicans ever convince themselves that "We're going to force Obama to deport immigrants and secure the border by attempting to defund the agency that deports immigrants and secures the border!" was a viable political plan? It makes no sense on the face of it. It never did.
As any longtime reader of this column (or, at the very least, as any reader from the last year or so) knows, I have been following the legalization of marijuana debate fairly closely, and indeed consider it to be one of the defining social issues of our age. I say this not to measure it by how important legalization is in the grand scheme of politics, but rather as one of the two issues (marriage equality being the other) which have experienced dramatic public perception turnarounds in the past decade or so. In all honesty, I've written about the subject so often in the past two years I had convinced myself that I had already written this article. When I searched my site for it, however, I found I had only mentioned the subject in passing in my year-end link dump (which consisted of "here are some other interesting stories that happened in 2014" links).
My interest was piqued because of the wide-ranging possible repercussions of a decision by the Justice Department last year that got little attention in the media. A few Native American tribes -- including one in Washington state, where recreational adult use had just been legalized -- asked the Justice Department for legal guidance on the issue of marijuana sales on tribal lands. The Justice Department, surprisingly, not only endorsed the idea but also seemed to throw the gates wide open for any other Native American tribe to grow and sell marijuana as well -- even in states that hadn't already legalized it. They essentially said tribes would have to adhere to the same set of federal legal guidelines that were created after Colorado and Washington legalized recreational marijuana sales.
My immediate reaction was that this could have far-reaching outcomes that few were bothering to point out. Which brings me (three paragraphs in, sorry about the digression) to the title of this article. Could marijuana legalization travel a similar route as legalized gambling, with Native American reservations taking a prominent lead? To put this in slightly more direct terms: Would casinos on tribal lands begin selling joints to the gamblers? And what impact would that have on the nationwide and state-level marijuana reform efforts?
