Ed Whelan, Bench Memos: The timing of the frivolous motion by the Prop 8 plaintiffs to vacate the stay pending appeal also reasonably invites suspicions that the Obama administration was colluding with them. Specifically: From what I can tell (and I invite correction on the point), the text of Attorney General Holder’s letter announcing the Obama administration’s decision to abandon the defense of DOMA apparently became publicly available somewhere around

Because nothing says the establishment GOP is interested in winning the future more than their willingness to ally themselves with a Marxist dead set on destroying it. Pragmatism!

Idea: a re-imagining of Mississippi Burning in which Hackman and Dafoe are cast as villains for trying to force a principled sheriff to arrest and prosecute “his people” — in this instance, a local community organizer who preaches ethnic pride and a handful of good ol’ boys/working men who have joined the fight to save civic custom.* Oppressed underdogs fight The Power. A can’t miss. — Though this time, we

What began as comedy has now become tragedy. Here’s Hillary Clinton, describing current US foreign policy to the House Foreign Relations Committee: If you follow, as we follow, all of the websites that are looking at what’s happening in the Middle East, you see a constant drumbeat that ‘the United States is going to invade Libya to take over the oil — and we can’t let that happen. The false

Harsanyi: With all the hand wringing and self-defeating talk from Republicans about the political cost of allowing the federal government to shut down for a couple of weeks, there is a missed opportunity. What better way to illustrate just how little taxpayers get back on their “investments”? And what a great time to demolish the myth that even modest cuts would detrimentally affect most Americans. Alas, it looks like the

— as described by Josh Kraushaar at National Journal: As bold as the governor has been in calling for tough cuts to the budget, he’s been equally timid in laying out the reasons to restrain collective bargaining in the public sector. He’s taking the approach of a revolutionary reformer, but with the arguments of a number-crunching accountant. If an elected official is going to bring up an issue sure to

Liberal Ruth Marcus, WaPo: For a man who won office talking about change we can believe in, Barack Obama can be a strangely passive president. There are a startling number of occasions in which the president has been missing in action – unwilling, reluctant or late to weigh in on the issue of the moment. He is, too often, more reactive than inspirational, more cautious than forceful. Each of these