Daily Beast
Iraq plunged into chaos Thursday as Kurdish forces seized control of the northern oil city of Kirkuk, while fighters from the terrorist group ISIS headed toward Baghdad. The armed forces quickly abandoned their posts in the north. With no government troops maintaining order, Kurdish fighters seized Kirkuk, which the semi-autonomous people view as their historical capital. After seizing Mosul and Tikrit, militants from ISIS, which has links to al Qaeda, have now advanced to within an hour of Baghdad.
Daily Mail
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DAILY BEAST:
The number of Americans who are consistently conservative or consistently liberal has doubled over the past 20 years, Pew Research reported Thursday. Twenty-one percent are now consistent liberals or conservatives, up from 10 percent in 1994. In addition, those partisan sentiments are stronger among those who profess them. Also, the number of people in each party who view the opposing party in a negative light has more than doubled since 1994. They believe the other guy’s policies “are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.” Good luck governing.
Charles Blow, N.Y. Times:
This phenomenon coincides, to a certain degree, with the rise of talk radio and the stridently ideological cable news — profit-driven provocateurs whose livelihoods ride on their abilities to rouse rabble, stir passions and diabolize opponents.
And many of their listeners, viewers and readers become the apostles of passion, enforcing rigid binary ideologies that accommodate little subtlety. Any seeming equivocation is deemed evidence of apostasy.
[Obama's] presidency, in many ways, has been hamstrung by opposition. In the wake of his ascension came the rise of the Tea Party, the incredible assertion by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, that conservatives’ top priority should be to keep Obama from being re-elected (that didn’t work out so well), the stunning assault on voter rights, the influx of conservative billionaires like the Koch brothers into the political arena, blatant gerrymandering after the last census and the unprecedented levels of obstruction by Republicans in Congress.
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Washington Post, Paul Waldman
Today, the Post published excerpts of Bowe Bergdahl’s journal, along with emails and other writings, giving us the most intimate, complex, and in many ways sad view we’ve yet had of the young man who had been held prisoner by the Taliban for five years.
What the journal ultimately shows suggests that as a partisan political issue, Bergdahl’s release is likely to fade before long. The right has gotten about as much as they can out of it, and now that we know how troubled Bergdahl was before he wandered off his base, they may just let it go.
The idea that Bergdahl wasn’t sufficiently deserving of rescue has been central to the conservative criticism of the deal to obtain his release. Even as they wildly exaggerate the danger of the five former Taliban we released (to hear Fox News tell it, you’d almost think the five not only planned and executed the September 11 attacks, they also have super-powers that will enable them to reduce our nation to ashes any day now), many on the right attacked Bergdahl and his family relentlessly, accusing him of being not just a deserter but an outright traitor. Some even mobilized a PR campaign to promote soldiers who would go in the media to criticize Bergdahl.
But his writings, which were shared with the Post by a close friend, tell a story that doesn’t fit into the kind of box that can be easily used for partisan purposes. Among other things, we now know that Bergdahl joined the Coast Guard in 2006 and was quickly discharged for psychological reasons, though he claimed to friends that he had faked mental illness in order to get released (a claim about which they were skeptical). But it’s Bergdahl’s own words that are the most revealing:
The 2006 discharge and a trove of Bergdahl’s writing — his handwritten journal along with essays, stories and e-mails provided to The Washington Post — paint a portrait of a deeply complicated and fragile young man who was by his own account struggling to maintain his mental stability from the start of basic training until the moment he walked off his post in eastern Afghanistan in 2009.=====================================
“I’m worried,” he wrote in one journal entry before he deployed. “The closer I get to ship day, the calmer the voices are. I’m reverting. I’m getting colder. My feelings are being flushed with the frozen logic and the training, all the unfeeling cold judgment of the darkness.”
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| Sponsored by Jeff Miller, the bill passes 421-0 with overwhelming bipartisan support. | AP Photo |
Yesterday, the House passed a bill to reform medical services at the Department of Veterans Affairs on an unusual unanimous vote. Harry Reid indicated today that the Senate’s version of the VA bill, co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders and John McCain, will be fast-tracked and could come up for a vote in the next couple of days.
Which means that unlike every other scandal (both real and trumped-up) that the Obama administration has confronted, this time demagoguery and feigned outrage gave way to — brace yourself — actual problem-solving. How could such a thing have happened?
After all, Republicans have been allergic to passing legislation of any kind. This Congress is on pace to be the least productive in history, and John Boehner has said Congress “ought to be judged on how many laws that we repeal.”
And just today, Senate Republicans successfully filibustered a bill allowing students burdened by crushing debt to refinance their loans. So what was different about the VA that allowed for an actual reform effort to succeed (granting that it hasn’t quite succeeded yet)?
The explanation is that as scandals go, this one just isn’t actually built to give Republicans that much mileage — unless they are willing to refuse to be part of the solution. But here is an area where that is impossible for them.
Indeed, for Republicans, the opportunities for demagoguery on the VA scandal have turned out to be limited. Sure, there have been some over-the-top statements here and there, and we have seen some desk-pounding for the cameras at hearings. But there is a specific need that demands action — and veterans groups are paying close attention — which means blaming our Kenyan Muslim Socialist president can only go so far. Every member of Congress has to be ready to answer the question, “What are you doing to solve the problem?”, and “I’m holding Barack Obama’s feet to the fire!” isn’t an answer any constituent is going to accept.
Beyond this is the fact that here is an area where Republicans and Democrats have fundamentally the same goal: they both want to see veterans get good health care. There are limits to their agreement — Republicans would also like to privatize the VA to whatever degree they can, just as they’d like to privatize Medicare and Medicaid. And this bill starts down that road, by allowing veterans who live more than 40 miles from a VA medical facility or who have been waiting for extended periods to take their VA coverage and get care at private providers. But unlike in previous controversies, both parties actually want to solve the problem.