Jul 23, 2013
All the cool kids are doing it, so we engage in some early-morning idle Royal Baby chat. But Greg Dworkin quickly puts us back on track with his roundup discussion of how the right-wing media machine actively misreads Barack Obama's record as a state senator to portray him as a hypocrite on Republican-favored shoot first laws. But misunderstanding "shoot first" does more than just gin up stories for political purposes, it has real world consequences when actual gun owners venture out on the limbs their supposed "thought leaders" told them would support their weight. Greg also brought up Nate Silver's move from the NYT to ABC/ESPN, and the upset he apparently caused in the Times newsroom. Afterwards: that skewed Obamacare premiums claim Indiana Republicans were making, and why it was garbage; Ed Kilgore's "Uh, Yeah, This Is a Different GOP"; Jonathan Chait's "Anarchists of the House"; Greg Sargent's "Republicans' dilemma: how aggressively should they sabotage Obamacare?" and The Hill's "GOP to constituents: Questions of ObamaCare? Call Obama." Then, "how Goldman Sachs is making your beer more expensive" and a WSJ story on the U.S. Marshals losing track of millions of dollars worth of encrypted radios. Finally, a wrap-up moment: how "warrior cops," cheap tech and privatization combine to erase the unwritten checks and balances against the expansion of government power.