LA Times:
Fox News and CNN plan to use an average of recent polls to pick the candidates for the first two Republican presidential debates, with the top 10 making the cut for the main event...
Later in the day, CNN, which is scheduled to host a debate in September at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, released its criteria, which added another twist. Its debate will have two segments: a main forum among the 10 candidates with the highest average poll ratings, and an earlier session with second-tier candidates.
New York magazine/
Frank Rich:
Right behind Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio became the second Republican hopeful to run into the latest GOP litmus test: being asked if it was a mistake to invade Iraq. (Scott Walker and Rand Paul have so far been able, just barely, to avoid the question directly.) What's the right answer here?
The reason Republican presidential candidates can’t come up with a “right answer” on Iraq is that there is no right answer that can satisfy both of their contradictory constituencies: (1) the voters they need to reach in the general election and (2) their party’s powerful neocon foreign-policy dead-enders, from Dick Cheney to Bill Kristol, who have not retreated one iota from their view that the Iraq War was the right thing to do, for the right reasons, and that anyone who says otherwise is soft on terrorism. Voters, by contrast, know full well that we blundered into Iraq for specious reasons, vaporizing thousands of American lives and some half million Iraqi lives (not to mention at least $2 trillion) with the end result of making America less safe and delivering Iraq into the clutches of both a new generation of radical Islamic terrorists and Iran. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last October found that a record high 66 percent of American adults thought the war wasn’t worth it. More record highs are sure to come. Even as Rubio was trying to stutter his way out of the Iraq-answer quagmire, Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, was falling to ISIS. This was only days after a 19-year-old college student reminded Jeb Bush that ISIS itself was a byproduct of his brother’s invasion of Iraq and the mismanaged occupation that followed.
Keep in mind that the question that tripped up both Rubio and Jeb Bush was asked on Fox News. Imagine what will happen when the GOP presidential field has to take tougher questions from outside the right’s bubble.
This article "rethinking Iraq" is extremely shameless and steaming BS even by normal David Brooks standards
http://t.co/...
— @mtaibbi
More politics and policy below the fold.
Vox:
Hillary Clinton doesn't need the press.
Maybe she will later on — if she slips in the polls — and that would be an argument for giving them care and feeding now. But the laws of politics are simply different for Clinton than they are for the other presidential candidates.
The discredited
Andrew Wakefield complains about how discredited his discredited work has left him:
During a conference in Orange County held by the group Moms in Charge, Wakefield complained that his career as a scientist had been ruined.
“As someone who has published science for a long, long time I’ve realized that they can simply destroy that,” he said during the April conference. “You can destroy a career of a scientist in five minutes — in five minutes. And it will take a lifetime to restore — if ever. It is so easily done.”
“There is no smoke without fire,” Wakefield continued. “You mentioned the word fraud, and it is all over. One of the things I have noticed about our community is that they play into the pharmaceutical industry’s public relations line. They say ‘discredited, discredited.’ Every article you write, write ‘discredited’ before Wakefield. ‘Discredited, discredited, discredited’ until it sinks into the consciousness of everybody.”
Poor guy. Maybe he shouldn't have lied about his research in the first place. In any case, this is a great example of how you can't just yell "Big Pharma!" and get everyone to ignore what you're doing.
Ron Fournier:
It is a pretty unsophisticated view—this notion that journalists can't harbor both positive and negative opinions about a past and potentially future president. It's one in a set of related assumptions shared by a growing number of political figures, both Republican and Democratic: Reporters are useless unless they blindly trust a politician, embrace his or her ideology, and pull punches when producing a positive story—or burying a bad one—serves a "greater good."
Outside of politics, relationships are far less binary. You might praise your daughter in the morning and punish her at night. You might trust a neighbor to water your plants, but not babysit your kids. You love your uncle, the boorish one whose calls you let ring through to voice mail.
Who expects even a spouse to be absolutely and always perfect?
Rich, healthy relationships are complicated. Like mine with the Clintons: If you were to count every election since the mid-1980s, when I moved to Arkansas and started covering them, I probably have voted for Bill Clinton more than almost anybody in Washington. In fairness, I've also voted against him more than most.
Bash Hillary all you want, or write about how you prefer Bernie. But keep the criticism grounded in reality.
Matthew Dowd writing about what should be the view of the American people:
A 21st century Moral Majority would support (but not be limited to the following):
They would push for dealing with the terrible lack of economic mobility in this country and the huge inequality that exists between the rich and everyone else. They would want policies to help the left behind 90% of the country, and do more for just plain average folks whether it be in tax, trade, or spending priorities. Not in handouts, but in policies that quit favoring a wealthy minority. They would want Wall Street reined in a big way, and folks prosecuted who took advantage of others no matter their economic status.
They would want our environment protected and a better balance made between economic progress and preserving a clean and healthy environment for our children. They understand that if you are a person of faith then protecting God’s creation has to be top of mind whether it be citizens of the world, rivers, lakes, land, drinking water, and the food we consume.
This moral majority would want gay marriage to be allowed across our country and for discrimination to be stopped whether it be by race, income level, sex, or sexual preference or even faith. They believe that allowing communities to express their love and compassion in the manner that is authentic to them is a moral truth. This majority also believes that folks should be able to have religious freedom that gives them the chance to live out their life’s of faith as long as it doesn’t hurt others.
Paul Waldman:
George W. Bush didn't just lie about the Iraq War. What he did was much worse.