Democracy | News-Opinion
TOP NEWS: Democracy: August 6, 2012
- Gunman Kills 6 at a Sikh Temple Near Milwaukee
- Rice, Haley, Huck, McCain confirmed as RNC speakers
- Curiosity Rover Lands Safely on Mars
- Romney Committees Raised Over $100 Million in July
- U.S. Officials Brace for Operating Health Exchanges
Excerpts and More Top Stories
SIKH SHOOTING: Gunman Kills 6 at a Sikh Temple Near Milwaukee
Steven Yaccino, Michael Schwirtz, and Marc Santor, NY Times – In addition to the dead, three people, including a police officer, were injured in the attack at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, officials said.
SIKH SHOOTING: Army Veteran Identified as Suspect in Sikh Temple Shooting
Arian Campo-Flores and Caroline Porter, Wall Street Journal – The suspect in a shooting that left seven people dead, including the attacker, at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin Sunday was identified as Wade Michael Page, a 40-year-old Army veteran, a U.S. law-enforcement official said Monday.
ELECTION 2012/GOP: Rice, Haley, Huck, McCain confirmed as RNC speakers
Maggie Haberman, Politico – “They are some of our party’s brightest stars, who have governed and led effectively and admirably in their respective roles,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in prepared remarks. “These speakers – and those that will be announced later – will help make it a truly memorable and momentous event.”
ELECTION 2012/TEA PARTY: Tea Party Sets Its Sights on the Senate
Albert R. Hunt, Bloomberg – The House last year became the spiritual home of the Tea Party. In 2013, the Senate may become the Tea Party’s cathedral. This year, Tea Party activists are winning Republican Senate primaries and are favored to win seats in the fall, including Ted Cruz in Texas, Deb Fischer in Nebraska and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. |
ELECTION 2012: Copying Obama’s ’08 Strategy, Romney Takes to the Ground in Colorado
Jack Healy, NY Times – With Colorado as narrowly divided and fiercely contested as any battleground state in the country, its fate this November may well depend on whether Mr. Romney’s campaign can build a ground-level presence like the one that helped carry Mr. Obama four years ago.
ELECTION 2012/VEEP STAKES: Romney Puts Possible Picks to Work
Sara Murray, Wall Street Journal – Mitt Romney is using speculation about his vice-presidential pick to build a fundraising advantage—which in turn is whipping up the guessing game.
ELECTION 2012/GOP: In Kansas, Conservatives Vilify Fellow Republicans
John Eligon, NY Times – Kansas politics have been tilting more to the right for at least the last two decades, and now that shift is prompting a bitter clash within the state’s Republican Party.
ELECTIONS 2012/ROMNEY WEALTH: Romney, the rich and the delicate politics of wealth and class
Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post – The notion that wealth is political liability is spliced into each tut-tutting reaction to each tin-eared utterance from Romney, a candidate who wants so badly to turn his financial success into a political asset but keeps stumbling into class warfare minefields.
MARS EXPLORER: Curiosity Rover Lands Safely on Mars
Kenneth Chang, NY Times – In a flawless, triumphant technological tour de force, a plutonium-powered rover the size of a small car was lowered at the end of 25-foot-long cables from a hovering rocket stage onto Mars early on Monday morning.
CAMPAIGN FINANCE: Romney Committees Raised More Than $100 Million in July
Nicholas Confessore, NY Times – Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee raised $101.3 million in July, his campaign announced Monday, as Republican donors rallied behind their nominee with the national convention only a few weeks away.
CAMPAIGN FINANCE: For the President, a Birthday Party With a Price Tag
Jodi Kantor, NY Times – President Obama is turning 51 on Saturday, with just three months until Election Day. So he will celebrate in true political fashion: spending “downtime,” as an e-mail invitation put it, at a party at his Chicago home with a bunch of strangers who made campaign donations to be there.
CAMPAIGN FINANCE: Outside Cash in Missouri Race Could Be a National Model
Jonathan Weisman, NY Times – Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, David and Charles Koch’s Americans For Prosperity, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the 60 Plus Association have dumped as much as $15 million into the state since July 2011, keeping Clare McCaskill (former TCG speaker) her on her heels.
HEALTHCARE: U.S. Officials Brace for Huge Task of Operating Health Exchanges
Robert Pear, NY Times – Obama administration officials are getting ready to set up and operate new health insurance markets in about half the states, where local officials appear unwilling or unable to do so.
ROMNEY TAXES: Republicans Step Up Attacks Against Reid
Emmarie Huetteman, NY Times – Top Republicans condemned Senator Harry Reid Sunday, accusing the Senate majority leader of fabricating an assertion that an unnamed Bain Capital investor had told him that Mitt Romney has not paid taxes over a 10-year period.
ROMNEY TAXES: Mitt Romney’s Harry Reid problem
Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake, Washington Post, Op-Ed – The problem for Romney on this matter is that he and Reid are simply not playing by the same set of rules because 1. His allegation against Romney only strengthens his hand among his Democratic colleagues 2. He’s not running for president and, therefore, isn’t subject to the same sort of transparency demands 3. He’s far less well-known than Romney, meaning that by engaging Reid, the Republican presidential nominee is punching down in a big way.
CYBERTERRORISM: Republicans Fail a Security Test
NY Times Editorial – Senate Republicans regularly promote themselves as the true custodians of national security. This claim seemed particularly hollow last week when they helped block a new measure aimed at protecting America’s vulnerable computer networks from attack by, among others, potentially hostile foreign governments.
INFORMATION LEAKS: The Leak Police
Bill Keller, NY Times, Opinion – Washington is currently going a little nuts on the subject of leaks, with the Obama administration surpassing all previous administrations in its prosecution of leakers. There is a plausible case that more secrets are spilling these days. In part that is because so much material is automatically, needlessly classified that officials tend not to take classification as seriously.
VOTER RIGHTS: In Ohio and elsewhere, battles over state voting laws head to court
Robert Barnes, Washington Post – Closing the deal with voters is only the beginning for President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, and not just in Ohio. In courthouses across the country, lawsuits are challenging state laws that dictate who may vote, when they may vote and whether their ballot will be counted once they have voted.
VOTER RIGHTS: Voter ID laws could sway US elections
Anna Fifield, Financial Times – Millions of US voters could be turned away at the ballot box as new rules impose tough requirements for identification that could lead to minorities and young people being excluded
RECESSION AFTERMATH: The social and economic reasons for Generation Squeezed
Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post, Opinion – The young (and I draw the line at 40 and under) face two threats to their living standards. The first is the adverse effect of the Great Recession on jobs and wages. Even if this fades with time, there’s the second threat: the costs of an aging America. It’s not just Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — huge transfers from the young to the old — but also deferred maintenance on roads, bridges, water systems and power grids.
STIMULUS: The Real ‘Stimulus’ Record
Arthur B. Laffer, Wall Street Journal, Opinion – Policy makers in Washington and other capitals around the world are debating whether to implement another round of stimulus spending to combat high unemployment and sputtering growth rates. But the first time around, it worked miserably. Of the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations, those with the largest spending spurts from 2007 to 2009 saw the least growth in GDP rates before and after the stimulus.
TAX REFORM: The Numbers Inside a Hot-Button Issue
Wall Street Journal – “Who’s right: Obama or Romney? Both. Or neither,” says Joseph Thorndike, a tax historian. “When it comes to taxing the rich, there is no single, objectively correct answer. You can talk all you want about asking rich people to pay ‘their fair’ share,’ but don’t kid yourself. You’re just trying to turn private opinions into public policy.”
GAY MARRIAGE: GOP steers clear of gay marriage issue
Maggie Haverman and Emily Schultheis, Politico – When Democrats announced that their 2012 platform would include a historic first — gay marriage written in as a plank — the reaction from mainstream Republicans was near silence. There were no statements blasted out from Mitt Romney’s campaign. The same was true for the Republican National Committee. Romney has yet to address the the fact.
EDUCATION: Carrots and Sticks for School Systems
NY Times, Editorial – New and long overdue incentives are needed to reward good teachers while easing chronic low performers out of the system.
PRIVACY RIGHTS: DNA and the Fourth Amendment
NY Times, Editorial – The Supreme Court should hear a Maryland case that raises important questions about whether the collection of DNA samples from people arrested but not yet convicted violates the Fourth Amendment.
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