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Michael Barone brings some good news. He says Mexico has become a stable politically diverse good neighbor.
I realize that most of the recent news on Mexico has been about violent drug wars. You get 500,000 hits when you Google “Mexico failed state.”
But that’s a misleading picture. The war on drug lords waged by President Felipe Calderon from 2006 to 2012 has had considerable success and has been re-emphasized by his successor, Enrique Pena Nieto.
The focus on the drug war ignores Mexico’s progress over the last 25 years as an electoral democracy. For 71 years, it had one-party rule of the PRI, or Party of the Institutional Revolution.
Under PRI rule, a president selected by his predecessor selected his successor.
But under PRI Presidents Carlos Salinas (1988-94) and Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000), Mexico established a clean election system under which the opposition conservative PAN and leftist PRD parties won state and legislative offices.
This was capped when PAN candidate Vicente Fox was elected president in July 2000. When Zedillo came on television and said, “I recognize that Vicente Fox is the next president of Mexico,” thousands of Fox supporters gathered around Mexico City’s Angel of Independence and stomped so strongly in unison that the Earth shook. …
Now for some fun. Sometimes karma is really kool. The Daily Beast on the awful time someone had in DC last week.
… Playing basketball with a bunch of kids got real embarrassing, real fast: Obama stands at the free-throw line, cameras rolling. He shoots, he… gets the ball to bounce precariously on the rim for a second before it falls, to the jeers of small children and members of the WNBA’s Washington Wizards. The president’s week got off to a rough start at the White House Easter Egg Roll on Monday, where he decided to shoot some hoops with some lucky kids. But the free-throw contest took a turn for the awkward when, despite the president’s professed love of basketball, it took him 15 tries to land a single shot, ultimately earning a final score of only 2 out of 22 shots. That’s a 9.1 percent success rate. “He couldn’t make one [throw],” said Kahron Campbell, 10. “I had to help him out.”
Michelle Obama forgot he exists? You know something’s rotten in Denmark when your wife (accidentally?) outs herself as a “busy single mother” during a televised interview. While talking about driving farmers’ market trucks into underserved communities to a reporter from a Vermont-based CBS station on Thursday, the first lady segued into a curious slip of the tongue. “Believe me, as a busy single mother—or, I shouldn’t say ‘single,’” she said, quickly correcting herself. “You know, when you’ve got the husband who’s president, it can feel a little single. But he’s there.” The fact that “he’s there” was the best thing that Michelle could say about Barack in that moment didn’t help. …
Chris Cillizza agrees the president had the “worst week in Washington” and that was based just on the comments on CA’s attorney general.
‘The world is full of guys,” Corey Flood says in the classic 1980s film “Say Anything.” “Be a man. Don’t be a guy.”
President Obama forgot that life lesson during a speech at a fundraiser in the San Francisco suburbs on Thursday. He sang the praises of California Attorney General Kamala Harris calling her “brilliant,” “dedicated” and “tough.” So far, so good. Then he added: “She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.” Much less good.
Touting a female politician’s looks is almost never smart — particularly when there’s already a story line out there that the president’s inner circle is a boys’ club that is unwelcoming to women.
For those who insist that Obama meant the looks comment as praise and that any outrage over it is manufactured, we ask this: Would he have mentioned how “handsome” Delaware State Attorney General Beau Biden is if he had been speaking an an event in the First State? Hard to imagine. …
When we saw the president do first pitch honors we learned he throws like a girl. OK, we were told his sport is basketball.
Well, Here’s a video of the 2 for 22 fail on the basketball court. After the first six misses, he calls for a new ball. Figures.
Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor takes a more intellectual approach.
… in a political rally in Colorado, Obama offered us this disquisition in political theory:
“You hear some of these quotes: ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government.’ ‘We can’t do background checks because the government is going to come take my guns away,’ Obama said. “Well, the government is us. These officials are elected by you. They are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place. It’s a government of and by and for the people.” …
… Where to begin? This seems to presume that “us” is some monolithic, reified thing. That there is some “will of the people.”
What about the tyranny of the majority? What about the tyranny of minorities that can occur in any democratic or representative system?
The whole freakin’ reason behind a bill of rights is that even in a democratic (or, more properly, republican) system, individual rights can be trampled and abused by a government responsive to the whims of a majority, or an empowered minority. That’s why we have a Bill of Rights.
In Obama’s formulation, not only would the 2d Amendment be superfluous, but so would the 1st and 5th (and 3d and 4th etc. etc.) No one need fear the denial of their freedom of speech or worship or assembly or right to a fair trial, because hey, the government is just us, and we would never harm us, would we? …
Glenn Reynolds suggests we need an IQ test for public servants (read public narcissists).
While politicians talk about expanding background checks for gun owners, I’m starting to think that what we really need are IQ tests for political officeholders. The only problem is, that might leave us with a lot of vacancies in Congress and America’s statehouses.
The debacle over New York’s rushed-through gun bill is one example of what happens when enthusiasm meets stupid. But another is to be found in Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), who supports a ban on full-capacity magazines without understanding what a magazine actually is.
Last week, DeGette justified her position this way: “I will tell you these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available.”
Um, ah . . . no. Completely wrong, in fact.
To make things simple enough that even a member of Congress can understand, it’s like this: …
Using the form of a book review, the NY Times finds some good to say about Texas.
AS a Texas-raised journalist, I can tell you two things with confidence about my native state. One, its economy has been humming nicely for years. Two, this appears to greatly offend a certain breed of Northern writer, several of whom have descended on the state in an attempt to rebut stories of a “Texas miracle.” Their reports, Erica Grieder writes, have contributed to “a widespread impression that Texas is corrupt, callous, racist, theocratic, stupid, belligerent, and most of all, dangerous.”
This is nothing new, as most any Texan will tell you. But Ms. Grieder, a onetime correspondent for The Economist who now works at Texas Monthly, and a Texan herself, has written a smart little book that counters much of this silliness, and explains why the Texas economy is thriving. It’s called “Big, Hot, Cheap and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas” (PublicAffairs, $26.99). The sad truth, alas, is that it’s probably a lot easier to understand the successes of Texas than it would be to duplicate them.
What might be copied, Ms. Grieder indicates, is the so-called Texas model — that is, a weak state government with few taxes and fewer regulations and services. It would be far harder to replicate the state’s civic DNA, …
Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.
Fallon: President Obama shot hoops yesterday and went two for 22. Tough times. One minute he asks Congress to raise the debt limit. The next he’s asking to lower the hoop.
Fallon: The president in a little trouble. During a fundraiser yesterday, President Obama raised eyebrows when he called California’s Kamala Harris quote “the best-looking attorney general in the country.” Then Michelle was like, “Well, here’s another joke, what’s black and white and sleeps on the couch?”
Fallon: Obama called Kamala Harris the best looking attorney general while at a California fundraiser. Hopefully, the fundraiser was to buy a really nice necklace for Michelle.
Leno: Obama apologizes to Joe Biden for saying California’s Attorney General Kamala Harris is so pretty. It’s Joe’s job to say the stupid, embarrassing stuff in public.