Michigan: Agema Ain't Going Away

We wrote about Michigan Republican National Committeeman David Agema a couple of weeks ago after the former state representative shared an article on his Facebook feed about the "filthy lifestyle" of homosexuals. This week he doubled down on his comments, telling a local radio station that he wants to help homosexuals out of their “lifestyle” because "the next thing that will occur is your kids will come home and say, 'I think this is a good thing and I think I want to be one.'" But it was the way he closed the interview that made headlines, when he compared gays with alcoholics: "If you really love someone, if you really were concerned about someone, if you saw your friend, for example, dying of alcoholism, would you just stand quietly by and watch it happen?"

North Carolina: Is That a Trick Question?

North Carolina State Representative Michele Presnell, a Republican, was caught out this week after an email exchange with one of her constituents was made public. In it, the constituent asks Presnell how she would feel if a prayer was made to Allah before legislative meetings, to which she responded: "No, I do not condone terrorism." Presnell continued linking the religion of Islam to terrorism at large as the constituent continued the debate, which eventually ended with a curt response from Presnell: "No, you are wrong. Have a good day."

Sen. Pat Toomey, the man who perfected Republicans’ eat-your-own politics as the president of the Club for Growth, found himself on the wrong end of conservatives’ pitchforks Thursday after he struck a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to expand criminal background checks to the sale of most guns. The background-check bill would not apply to all guns, nor would it ban the future sale of any specific gun or ammunition. But the backlash from conservatives and gun groups on even that slim piece of gun-control legislation was fast and furious.

“You, sir, are a lying treasonous #&$,” read one comment on the newly created “Sen. Arlen Toomey” Facebook page, a right-of-center rant-athon named for Toomey and the late Sen. Arlen Specter, the man Toomey challenged twice and eventually banished to the Democratic Party for his insufficient conservatism. “Your [sic] are a backstabbing RINO. Gun owners had a big part in putting you in office,” another Facebook user posted, after 15 Republicans joined Toomey to defeat a filibuster against the bill.

Toomey insisted Wednesday that the bill itself wasn’t about guns at all. “I gotta tell ya—candidly—I don’t consider criminal background checks to be gun control,” he said. “I think it’s just common sense. If you pass a criminal background check, you get to buy a gun, it’s no problem.”

Dick Cheney has such a reassuring way about him.

This is a man who was determined to go after Saddam Hussein, who wanted to stand up to Iran, who pushed domestic surveillance, who championed such a bellicose foreign policy that George W. Bush had to rein him in during his second term.

There would be every expectation, therefore, that Cheney, in this week’s briefing with Republican leaders in Washington, would counsel a very aggressive stance toward the young North Korean leader who is striking a warlike pose toward the United States.

This week, President Obama birthed a still-born budget that Herbert Hoover could have loved. With little surprise but much fanfare, Barack Obama unveiled his new call for austerity in the midst of a near-jobless recovery. The budget does nothing for the bulk of working Americans— who endured a 2 percent Social Security tax hike as the price of not tumbling over the fiscal cliff—except, of course, leaves a tax increase in place that will cost a family making $40,000 a year an extra $800 in payroll taxes.

But the Dow and the S&P have hit new highs since the budget’s Wednesday release. Obama, the self-proclaimed agent of change, has discovered establishment economics and happily embraced the creed of the grand bargain. Centrists of an elite variety are toasting the onetime Chicago community organizer who may now rightfully sit at the right hand of Pete Peterson.

Already, the Democratic left is thundering against it. Usually, it is Republicans who get zapped by stepping on the “third rail” of Social Security. But this time, it is the president who has put his foot in it. 

The starter gun for the 2016 presidential race went off Wednesday, however so slightly, when Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley indicated for the first time that he is seriously considering a bid.

The Democrat told The Baltimore Sun, “I need to be spending a lot more energy and time giving serious consideration and preparation to what—if anything—I might have to offer should I decide to run for president in 2016,” during a meeting with the paper’s editorial board tied to the end of the legislative session in Maryland.

Although potential candidates are hiring key staff and visiting the early primary states of New Hampshire and Iowa, O’Malley’s comments are among the most explicit yet by anyone on either side of the aisle about the next campaign.

The Senate beat back a Republican filibuster on gun legislation Thursday morning by a vote of 68-31, clearing the way for possible floor votes and giving the Obama administration and its allies a glimmer of hope.

It was only a tentative first step, but a crucial showdown nonetheless. The GOP failed to muster the necessary 60 votes to cut off debate, opening the door to a legislative compromise that would still face numerous obstacles on the road to passing the Republican-controlled House.

In the early skirmishing, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said: “It’s just gotta end. The answer can’t be as it has been for 20 years that we’re gonna do nothing.”

With the release of the Obama budget, coming into view now just on the far horizon is an image of how the rest of his time in office might play out. Right now Obama is making what I think and hope is his final offer to Republicans. He has put changes to entitlement programs on the table in a big and visible way. Once they refuse this deal, as I and most people expect they will, then what happens? Right now we’re seeing Obama being moderate, cautious; trying to seem reasonable. But after the rejectionists reject him yet again, I want to see a president who turns the tables on these jokers and uses his remaining time not aiming to meet a group of maniacs halfway, but trying to reframe these conversations entirely for the sake of his legacy and for the sake of future presidents and battles.

What’s going to happen here is the following bleak sequence of events. First the GOP is going to say no no no no no, because Obama’s budget calls for $580 billion in revenue (by the way, it proposes $2 in cuts for every $1 in revenue, for a total of $1.8 trillion in deficit reduction). The sequestration cuts are going to continue. Then will come mid-May, when Congress needs to raise the debt ceiling again. The Republicans will probably extract more cuts there. But as they will never accept more revenue or do anything to give Obama a political victory, we will just keep limping along through this year and into next with Congress funding the operations of government on an ad hoc basis.

Then the election will come. Obama will campaign saying, folks, I’ve tried everything I could to reason with these people, but they won’t settle for half a loaf, or even two thirds of a loaf; they want the whole loaf, and nobody in life gets the whole loaf. They are the problem, and you must throw them out. Give me a Democratic House—it’s the only way we’ll get anything done in the next two years.

President Obama is an old hand at absorbing attacks from his left flank. He got plenty of incoming hostility Wednesday during a conference call staged by a liberal advocacy group to highlight perceived flaws in his budget proposals.

But it’s a novel—and not altogether pleasurable—experience for House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi to serve as target practice for the left.

Pelosi, the 13-term San Francisco congresswoman who was toppled from the House speakership during the Republican landslide of 2010, came in for harsh criticism from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

1. Art Young’s “Jesus Christ Wanted” (1917)

2. Robert Minor’s “The Perfect Soldier” (1916)

Last month, some crazy whim compelled me to text the former New York congressman who knows better than anybody that cyber messaging can elicit surprising impulses.

“Why don’t you just run for mayor and remind everybody how much you have to offer and how tough you are?” I wrote. “The worst than can happen is you lose.”

The response from Anthony Weiner was: “Not a crazy idea.”

President Obama’s new budget proposal is a mostly modest document, mostly emphasizing modest trims and reducing inefficiencies. But if you dig deep enough, there are a handful of exciting science and technology projects in there, including NASA’s plan to capture an asteroid and haul it to the moon. The Daily Beast rounds up five of the most interesting projects.

Lasso an Asteroid!

NASA gets $78 million to start working on a plan to capture a small asteroid and move it into the moon’s orbit, where scientists can study it and eventually (Obama’s goal is 2025) visit in person. The research would be a boon to prospective space miners and, NASA says, help develop technology that could prevent an asteroid from slamming into the Earth and killing everyone. The budget also asks for continued funding for the Orion rocket, which will eventually take humans to Mars, and money to send a large rover to the red planet by 2020.

Meat Loaf famously said that “two out of three ain’t bad.” By this standard, President Obama’s fiscal year 2014 budget, released Wednesday, ain’t bad. It certainly makes more sense than most of what passes for serious fiscal discussion in Washington. But it doesn’t do all that is necessary to boost U.S. growth—now or in the future.

The best economic-growth plan would be built around three elements: an ambitious public-investment agenda; serious measures to broaden the tax base and pare entitlement benefits for well-to-do retirees—not for now, but over the long term; and reforms to resolve festering issues from the 2008 financial meltdown. The president’s plan has versions of at least the first two elements. It moves beyond mindless austerity by offering up new public investments. It also uses a sensible mix of new revenues and entitlement changes to restore long-term fiscal sanity. Equally important, the budget phases in those changes down the road when the economy (we hope) will be stronger.

To appreciate why continued austerity would be economically reckless, just review the economic data for 2012. The United States did grow faster than most other advanced economies. But that’s only because the euro zone has been back in recession since mid-2012, France and Britain barely grew at all last year, with rates of 0.1 percent and 0.2 percent growth, respectively, and Germany expanded less than 1 percent. So, the United States looks good with 2.2 percent growth for 2012—even though it slumped to 0.4 percent in the final quarter. Among the major developed economies, only Australia (3.3 percent) outpaced America in 2012.

This week’s New York Times Magazine offers Anthony Weiner roughly 9,000 words—to wax poetic about the fallout over the tweeted photograph of his boner—and the chance to informally throw his hat back in the ring for a possible New York City mayoral run. N.Y.C.’s potential first “Crotch Shot Mayor” and his wife, Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, discuss Weiner’s Twitter scandal, his political downfall, his bizarre behavior, her decision not to leave him, and his possible political comeback.

“We have been in a defensive crouch for so long,” Weiner says, explaining why they’re addressing the scandal now. “We are ready to clear the decks on this thing.” Abedin agrees. “I have now gotten used to people asking, over and over, again, ‘How is Anthony?’ Oh, he’s good! ‘But how is he doing?’ He’s doing fine.” How fine? Here, the 10 juiciest bits from “Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin’s Post-Scandal Playbook.”

He’s running, basically. Mercifully, the lede is not buried here. “Weiner quickly put all the speculation to rest: he is eyeing the mayor’s race,” writer Jonathan Van Meter begins the fifth paragraph. More than $100,000 was poured into polling and research to test the waters for Weiner’s comeback. The question, according to David Binder, Obama’s longtime pollster hired by Weiner’s political committee, was, “Are voters willing to give him a second chance or not, regardless of what race or what contest?” Binder says the response, generally, was, “Yeah, he made a mistake. Let’s give him a second chance.”

It was the only time I have ever regretted putting my hand on someone’s shoulder.

I was standing in a classroom somewhere behind the auditorium at Newtown High School in Connecticut. I had arrived a few hours before, and my job was to staff President Obama as he visited the families of the children who had been killed just two days before.

The task was straightforward: work with a team of logistical experts (in Washington-speak, the “advance team”) to set up a series of classrooms where the families of the fallen could meet quietly with President Obama. And then, as the faith-based office director and religious adviser, I was to accompany the president on these somber visits.