Daily Kos

The national task force established in the wake of the slaughter of kindergarteners in Connecticut by a heavily armed, mentally disturbed gunman last month is set to release its recommendations Tuesday, well within the end-of-January deadline set by President Obama in December.

The proposals are likely to cover a broad range of issues, including possible new restrictions on the kinds of firearms that can be purchased, background checks of buyers, mental health and social service interventions, and other measures. Some mandates, such as ensuring that every buyer of a gun undergoes a background check, probably have a better than even chance of passing the Senate and House. Others, for example, the reinstatement of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban that expired in 2004, are in for tough sailing.

There is no expectation that banning Internet sales of ammunition, registering firearms or licensing gun owners will be included in the task force's recommendations.

The Center for American Progress has just released its recommendations. Included in the list is an assault weapons sales and manufacturing ban that goes further than the 1994 ban, but would not confiscate or buy back such weapons from Americans who already own them.

No surprise that the key obstacle to any new restrictions on gun sales is the National Rifle Association. It has its hooks deeply embedded in the Republican Party that holds the majority in the House of Representatives. Although that majority is fractious on some matters, it can be expected to be unified on gun restrictions and at least a few Democrats can be expected to join it. The NRA has made itself clear:

David Keene, president of the National Rifle Association, told CNN's State of the Union on Sunday that new restrictions on guns are unconstitutional and ineffective.

"They interfere with people's rights (to gun ownership) without doing anything to solve the problem," Keene said.

The organization has worked diligently since 2008 to persuade Americans that Obama wants to take away their guns despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Biden, who the president chose to preside over the task force, has, like many other Americans, called for a comprehensive approach in dealing with gun violence. To that end he and other Cabinet members have met with a broad range of representatives from gun ownership and gun-control organizations (including the NRA), hunters, community leaders, law enforcement officials, educators, health professionals and representatives of the video game industry.

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Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson If you live in North Carolina or Louisiana, you might be asking yourself, "Can my state government get any worse?" Fear not. They're trying. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal wants to end the state income tax and corporate taxes and raise the sales tax to compensate. Ditto North Carolina Republicans:

[North Carolina state Sen. Bob] Rucho and other like-minded lawmakers have a plan to do away with all state individual and corporate income taxes. The plan would replace lost revenue with a new business license fee and a higher sales tax on goods and services not now taxed by the state, such as legal, accounting and spa services, and food.

In his inaugural address on Saturday, Republican North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory promised to work with business "as partners" to eliminate taxes and regulation that stifle growth.

Rucho's plan would remake the North Carolina budget, which now derives 65 percent of its $18.5 billion in total tax revenues from individual income and corporate taxes.

To make up for that much lost revenue, the state sales tax rate would have to rise to 6.53 percent from 4.75 percent, according to a supportive study done by a consulting firm run by Arthur Laffer, a former adviser to Republican President Ronald Reagan and one of the fathers of "trickle-down" economics.

Arthur Laffer being behind this should tell you most of what you need to know. But in case it doesn't, consider this: All those times Republicans have told poor people to just eat cheap, live on rice and beans? Now they're trying to raise taxes on rice and beans to fund a giant corporate tax cut.

Republicans really are trying to turn our country into some kind of corporate dystopia.

(Previous thread.)

9:16 AM PT: So far, 5 question: 3 on debt limit, 2 on guns. Obama is answering a debt limit question at the moment, making the argument that we need to break the cycle of governing by crisis and hostage standoff, and that he's taking a stand on the debt limit and won't back down.

9:21 AM PT: Now a question on appropriations—whether Obama would be prepared to let Republicans shut down the government. Obama points out that Congress has the power of the purse. It would be a terrible make for them to shut down the government, he says, but if they want to do it, they probably have enough votes. But he says they shouldn't: they should, instead, ask what it is they want to achieve, and sit down and talk with Democrats on how to accomplish their agenda. Obama is now hinting at a grand bargain style deal. But Obama says it seems as though the GOP isn't primarily interested in deficit reduction, rather they are on a ideological bender and are obsessed with going after things like Social Security and Medicare. (Well, he says it more politely, but that's basically his point.)

9:25 AM PT: First part of last question is about whether or not President Obama and his staff don't socialize enough. The second part of the question is whether there is enough diversity in his administration.

9:26 AM PT:

9:29 AM PT: Obama points to the diversity of his first term picks, particular with women. And then says people should wait to see his full second term picks before judging. On the question of whether he's a sociable enough guy, he somehow manages to answer the question with a straight face, which is pretty much all the proof you need that he's not that hard to get along with. Obama says the problems aren't personal: it's that there's substantive differences between his views and Republicans.

9:30 AM PT: Man, what a stupid question. (The part about whether he socializes enough with Washingtonians.)

9:32 AM PT:

President Barack Obama is scheduled to hold the final news conference of his first term today at 11:30 ET. He is expected to address the debt limit in his opening remarks and both guns and immigration are among the other topics likely to come up. You can watch it live at the top of this post (or here) and follow along for live updates and comments.

8:35 AM PT: News conference postponed to 11:40 ET. Looking forward to a stimulating debate on Twitter about the policy ramifications of this delay.

8:39 AM PT: And here's the president. "A busy and productive four years, and I expect the same for the next four years."

8:41 AM PT: "We are poised for a good year—if we make sound decisions and good investments." If politics doesn't get in the way, he says. Deficit reduction is a part of that, he says. Then talks about the plan he's been pushing for two years. "Step-by-step, we've made progress towards that goal." Mentions spending cut bills and taxes already signed. "About $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction over the past two years"—excluding $400 billion in savings from winding down Afghanistan/Iraq wars.

8:43 AM PT: Spending cuts alone won't get us to the $4 trillion he wants, Obama says. It must include revenue. And, he says, it turns out "the American people agree with me."

8:45 AM PT: "I want to be clear about this: the debt ceiling is not a question of authorizing more spending. Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize more spending. It simply allows the country to pay for spending Congress has already committed to. [...] American cannot afford another debate with this Congress about whether they will pay the bills they have already racked up."

8:47 AM PT: Obama runs down a list of dire consequences of Republicans not raising the debt limit. "It would be a self-inflicted wound on the economy. It would slow down our growth, might tip us into recession, and ironically might increase our deficit." Even talking about default is "irresponsible" and "absurd." It's on House Republicans, he says, and they must act with haste: "They will not collect ransom...Americans financial well-being is not leverage...they better choose quickly."

8:51 AM PT: First question is from AP on gun violence. Obama starts answer by talking about Biden's group and pledges action.

8:53 AM PT: Chuck Todd asks Obama about whether he has a plan B if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling. Obama starts out by focusing on the need to raise the debt ceiling: "There is a very simple solution to this: Congress authorizes us to pay our bills. [...] There are no magic tricks here. There are no loopholes. There are no easy outs." (He doesn't mention we've already hit debt limit and are already taking extraordinary measures.)

8:54 AM PT: Obama: "I am required by law to go ahead and pay these bills. Separately, they have to raise the debt ceiling" so that we can pay these bills. "What they cannot do," he says, is order him to spend money and block him from spending it at the same time.

8:57 AM PT: Obama says he doesn't believe the founders intended for the debt ceiling to be a negotiating hostage, but he also doesn't directly answer the plan B question. (At least not so far.) Basically, he is saying what Congress needs to do in order to avoid the need for a plan B. And it's clear that he believes that anything that would fall into the category of a plan B would be far, far worse than Congress simply raising the debt limit or authorizing him to do so.

8:59 AM PT: Obama says he's happy to negotiate over fiscal policy. But what he will not do "is have that negotiation with a gun at the head of the American people."

9:00 AM PT: "Chuck, what I'm saying to you is there's no simpler solution [...] there's no ready-to-go solution" other than to simply raise the debt limit.

9:01 AM PT: Obama compares GOP not raising debt limit to going to a restaurant and not paying the bill. He says that's illegal. (The conflict between Congress ordering him to spend while simultaneously refusing to allow him to spend is a legal issue he'd need to resolve if it came to it.)

9:05 AM PT: Major Garrett basically accuses Obama of seeking to become the first president ever to refuse to negotiate over raising the debt limit. Uh, dude, check out what the Clinton White House was saying when Newt's GOP tried it out:

On November 9, 1995, a senior administration official told the Washington Post, “Our position is it does not matter what they put on this legislation, we are not going to accept anything but clean bills because we will not be blackmailed over default. Get it? No extortion. No blackmail. What you hear are their screams of complaint as they realize we are not, not, not budging on this."

9:10 AM PT: Another question on guns, this one from Jon Karl. 4 questions so far. Guns, debt limit, guns, debt limit.

9:14 AM PT: Another question about the debt limit. This one premised on two false notions: that Obama said he wouldn't negotiate over debt limit in 2011 (he actually said that he would) and that he wouldn't negotiate over ending Bush tax cuts for wealthy in 2012 (also not true–he ruled out extending them all, but left open possibility of extending some).

9:14 AM PT: Obama says a big difference between now and 2011 is that we've already cut $1.2 trillion in spending. (Actually, it's $1.8 trillion, if you include interest as well as the FY2011 budget, and $2.4 trillion if you include new tax revenue, but his point stands.)

Politico's Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Jake Sherman drive the morning™:

House Republicans are seriously entertaining dramatic steps, including default or shutting down the government, to force President Barack Obama to finally cut spending by the end of March.

Okay, before we even get to the Republicans, you've got to love the way that sentence ends: "President Barack Obama to finally cut spending by the end of March." There's just one little problem with it: President Barack Obama just so happens to be the very same guy who signed the Budget Control Act of 2011 into law. And he's also the same guy who signed the fiscal year 2011 appropriations bill into law. Together, those two measures account for $1.8 trillion in spending cuts. If you add in the increased taxes on income over $450,000, we've done $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction.

So President Obama hasn't merely cut spending, he's cut it significantly. And overall, he's gotten more than halfway towards the $4 trillion target outlined by his deficit commission. Personally, I think he's focused way too much on the deficit, but that's neither here nor there. The key point here is that any article that purports to be about the budget battles really ought to at least make an effort to stay grounded in reality. And saying that President Obama hasn't cut spending is the exact opposite of that.

Amusingly, VandeHei, Allen, and Sherman actually contradict their lede later on in their article, pointing out that $1.2 trillion in spending cuts from the sequester are already on the books:

The conventional wisdom is that Obama and Congress will ultimately work out a grand spending compromise that raises the debt limit, keeps funding the government and changes the $1.2 trillion in automatic “sequestration” spending cuts set to kick in on March 1.

Well that must be great news, because when the article began, Republicans were waiting for President Obama to "finally cut spending." But now, about ten paragraphs later, he's already signed $1.2 trillion in cuts into law. It does point out that he wants to replace some of those cuts with revenue increases, which is a fair point, but he's not talking about replacing all of them. In any case, Republicans don't need to do anything dramatic to let them start taking effect: they just need to do nothing.

The article parrots Boehner's spin that Republicans are prepared to accept the sequester as-is, but doesn't point out that defense hawks in his conference are already calling his bluff. But in either case, the sequester is already baked in. The spending levels have already been cut. If the question is whether or not Republicans will insist on additional cuts, the sequester is irrelevant.

That brings us to what this article was supposed to be about: the twin questions of whether Republicans will force default by refusing to raise the debt limit and whether they will shut down the government by refusing to pass appropriations bills when funding expires on March 27.

On that front, the article actually does include some interesting speculation, making the case that Boehner may try to escape the debt limit trap he's set for himself by focusing House GOP attention on the prospect of a government shut down fight instead of default. Adding weight to the theory is a quote from House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers explicitly threatening a government shut down—but not default. The article also includes background reporting indicating that even if that gambit fails, Boehner won't force default, suggesting that he will once again break the Hastert rule, under which he would only allow votes on legislation supported by a majority of Republicans.

But even though the article is provocative and does have some useful information, it begins and ends with the thesis that President Obama has refused to cut spending or take steps to reduce the deficit. In so doing, it pretends that the lunatic Republicans that Boehner is so desperately trying to reign in are actually grounded in reality. For better or worse, that thesis is throughly false—and there's 2.4 trillion reasons why.

Reposted from Comics by Tom Tomorrow

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Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by David Nir Leading Off:

• WV-Sen: In an unsurprising move, Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller declared on Friday that will not seek re-election in 2014, though he does intend to finish out his term. Rockefeller is 75 and would have been seeking his sixth term, in a state that's grown increasingly hostile to Democrats; West Virginia went for Mitt Romney 62-36 in the most recent election (making it Obama's fifth-worst state), and the president lost every single county.

But Rockefeller, too, had seemingly moved away from the political mainstream in his home state. Back in June, we took note of some extremely unusual remarks Rockefeller made on the Senate floor, castigating the coal industry for engaging in scare tactics over any attempts to regulate it. At the time, it seemed like a potential signal that Rocky was eyeing the exits—after all, you don't go after Big Coal when you're up against a very competitive race in a state where the demographics are racing away from you.

Whether that speech was a tell or not, GOP Rep. Shelley Moore Capito's early entry into the contest back in November certainly raised the stakes for Rockefeller, given that she's unquestionably the strongest Republican candidate in the state. In response to Capito's move, Rockefeller sounded pretty unenthusiastic about saddling up for still one more race, so Friday's development was not unexpected.

The real question, of course, is what Democrats do next. Despite West Virginia's move to the right, there's still a strong Democratic bench. What's more, given Rockefeller's attacks on coal (as well as his lack of fire in the belly), this could be a rare situation where Dems might be better off with a replacement instead of the incumbent. No matter what, though, you can bet that DSCC chair Michael Bennet has been on the horn with potential recruits all weekend. Here's what some possible names are already saying in response to the news:

A few other names percolating include ex-Gov. Gaston Caperton, state Sen. Jeff Kessler, and state Treasurer John Perdue, the latter two of whom were both 2011 gubernatorial candidates. A longshot would be current Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, though thanks to a special election, he had to run back-to-back races in 2011 and 2012 and may be ready for a breather.

Meanwhile, GOP Rep. David McKinley, who had previously held the door open to a possible run despite Capito's entrance, says he's still not ruling anything out, while the Senate Conservatives Fund insists that they're "not going to stop looking for a conservative challenger in this race until the primary is over." Er, fellas, it's okay if you quit your scavenger hunt at the filing deadline. Oh, no, wait: write-in!

Undoubtedly we'll hear a lot more on this front in the coming weeks. And note that if Rahall were to jump in, that would create an open seat in his 3rd Congressional District, which would be an extremely tough hold for Democrats given how red it is (it went for Romney 65-33). Capito's House seat is, of course, also open, meaning we could see a lot of action in West Virginia this cycle—and we'll be there to cover it all.

Daily Kos Radio's Kagro in the Morning show podcasts are now available through iTunes.

The new House of Representatives returns, to work on a bill that purports to be Sandy relief, "The Sandy Recovery Improvement Act of 2013." Since there really hasn't been any Sandy relief to speak of, I'm not sure what they think they're "improving" here, unless it's the lack of response to date. But even that would be too optimistic with these guys. This feels like it might not go well.

We'll have plenty to talk about, nonetheless. The apparent death of The Coin. Crazy Republicans. More people who've accidentally shot themselves. And other such nuggets as may present themselves.

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Need more info on how to listen, or how to call in to the show? Find it below the fold.

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Margaret and Helen Monday

The 80-somethings got somethin' to say, and I 'spec we best listen:

Some peckerwood named Wayne LaPierre at the National Rifle Association announced that the NRA would form the National School Shield Emergency Response Program. And by that he means “armed security” at every school. I don’t know Margaret, NSSERP doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as NRA. This from the people who came up with “Trigger the Vote” as a voter registration slogan for the last election. I guess I expected better. …

Of course, asking the NRA for a solution to gun violence is like asking Wal-Mart for a solution to big box stores. Somehow having more of them was going to be a given. … If we follow the logic of LaPierre, we need armed security at elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, college campuses, movie theatres, malls, churches, office buildings, grocery stores, parades… I guess the NRA needs to create the National Everywhere Shield Emergency Response Program (NESERP). Now that has a nice ring to it. Sadly, with almost 300 million guns in America, we’re already there thanks to the lobbying efforts of the NRA.

Mr. LaPeirre also called on Congress to create “an active national database of the mentally ill". I couldn’t agree more. The first name on that list can be his. I mean it. Really.

Joe Biden comes out with his task force recommendations tomorrow. I'm sure it'll be a low-key affair, with thoughtful input from both sides, resulting in comprehensive legislation passed into law by huge margins of bipartisan support. Tonight when I'm dreaming, I mean.

Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

Paul Krugman at The New York Times says Japan's new approach for emerging from stagnant growth may provide an example for the United States in Japan Steps Out:

And there’s another lesson in Japan’s experience: While getting out of a prolonged slump turns out to be very difficult, that’s mainly because it’s hard getting policy makers to accept the need for bold action. That is, the problem is mainly political and intellectual, rather than strictly economic. For the risks of action are much smaller than the Very Serious People want you to believe.

Consider, in particular, the alleged dangers of debt and deficits. Here in America, we are constantly warned that we must slash spending now now now or we’ll turn into Greece, Greece I tell you. But Greece, a country without a currency, doesn’t look much like the United States; surely Japan offers a more relevant model. And while doomsayers keep predicting a fiscal crisis in Japan, hyping each uptick in interest rates as a sign of the imminent apocalypse, it keeps not happening: Japan’s government can still borrow long term at a rate of less than 1 percent.

E. J. Dionne Jr. writes at the  Washington Post that America is not in decline or retreat:

Like many Democrats, he saw the war in Afghanistan as justified by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, in a way Iraq was not. But time and conditions on the ground have convinced him that there are limits to what the United States can accomplish there. He’s trying to extract our troops in a careful but expeditious way. He has been reluctant to commit to large-scale public action in Syria on the grounds of prudence: The calculus of costs and benefits is not at all clear to him or to his advisers.

In the meantime, he is reorienting our foreign policy toward a surging Asia and concentrating on rebuilding the American economy. (We also should be paying more attention to Latin America, but that’s another story.) The appointments of Hagel and of John Kerry as secretary of state could have the additional benefit of strengthening our ties to Europe. The personal histories of both, as Financial Times columnist Philip Stevens observed last week, show they have “Atlanticism in their blood.”

None of this is about retreat, decline or isolationism. It’s an approach rooted in realism about the true sources of American power and the urgency of getting our domestic and economic act together.

John McWhorter at the New York Daily News says we should Call it gun murder, not ‘gun violence’ :

“Gun violence,” the current term of art, sounds euphemistic and even bureaucratic, like one more thing sitting in the in-box as always. Those are hardly the associations we need when addressing in a real way, at last, the epidemic of senseless mass murders in this nation.

Harry J Enten, who blogs about political and electoral statistics at Margin of Error, writes at the Guardian in How far can President Obama go with an executive order on gun control?

The common view is that any legislation that is at all controversial would have a difficult time getting passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Now, Biden has raised the possibility of getting gun control measures by executive order.

My advice for the president as someone who reads polls: go for it, if it's what you want to do. There is much discussion that acting by executive order would be seen as a "totalitarian" action and provoke a backlash. Nonsense, so long as the order is supporting a measure the public favors.

Carl Hiassen at the Miami Herald laments in :

It’s only fitting that the NRA’s biggest tool in Florida is a funeral director.

He is Rep. Dennis Baxley, an Ocala Republican who does whatever the gun lobby wants.

Three days after the slaughter of first-graders in Newtown, Conn., Baxley made national headlines by suggesting that weapons should be carried by employees at public schools.

Frank J. Fleming at The Patriot Post writes Pretend Gun Control:

The main fallacy of gun control theory is in not realizing that criminals, by definition, don't follow laws -- they're wily that way. Yet most gun control laws are aimed at this mythical criminal who thinks nothing of murdering people but would never dream of jaywalking. Still, people insist that we have to do something about criminals' easy access to guns, but in a country where we have over 300 million civilian-owned firearms, that's a bit like saying the American settlers shouldn't have taken this land from the Indians -- you might have a point, but that ship sailed long ago.

The Editorial Board of The Independent states in The unaffordable cost of climate change delay:

If there were any remaining doubts as to the need for concerted and swift action, however, the latest draft US National Climate Assessment, published on Friday, puts paid to them. The Washington-commissioned analysis makes clear that America is already feeling the impact of global warm- ing; infrastructure, water supplies, crops and coastal geographies are being noticeably affected, it says, while heatwaves, downpours, floods and droughts are all both more common and more extreme. The 240-strong panel of experts also explicitly state, contrary to Republican lore, that rising temperatures are "due primarily to human activities." [...]

As economic malaise leaves the case for environmental policies harder to make, and international efforts lose their gloss, climate change is slipping off the agenda. We cannot afford for it to do so. As the US report says: "Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present." There is, then, no more time to waste.

Tom Engelhardt at the Los Angeles Times opines in The CIA's greatest hits that there are movies galore to be made from the agency's decades of tortures and coups.

Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times writes in The White House may use Chuck Hagel's confirmation hearing to emphasize a tougher stance toward Tehran:

In a 2008 book, Hagel suggested that the United States might be able to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, just as it learned to live with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union. [...]

But that was the old Hagel, before he was nominated for secretary of Defense. Last week, as he prepared for his confirmation hearings, Hagel took pains to reassure senators that he is falling fully in line with Obama's tougher position on Iran.

"He strongly supports the president's position on Iran," one official told me after speaking with Hagel at the Pentagon. "He agrees that military action should be on the table."

In a conversation with Dennis Ross, Obama's former advisor on Iran, Hagel went a step further into the hawkish camp.

"He was very clear that he believes we can't live with an Iran that has nuclear-weapons capability," Ross told me.

Rick Perlstein at The Nation writes Remembering Aaron Swartz:

I had other plans for how to spend my Saturday. I had other plans for my next blog post here at The Nation. Then I learned my friend Aaron Swartz had committed suicide, facing a baseless, bullying federal indictment that might have sent him to jail for decades, and fate demanded this be a day to remember. [...]

I remember always thinking that he always seemed too sensitive for this world we happen to live in, and I remember him working so mightily, so heroically, to try to bend the world into a place more hospitable to people like him, which also means hospitable to people like us. I like what the blogger Lambert Strether wrote on my Facebook page (in Aaron’s memory, friend me!): “Our society should be selecting for the Aaron Swartz’s of this world. Instead, generous and ethical behavior, especially when combined with technical brilliance, turns out to be maladaptive, indeed lethal. If Swartz had been Wall Street’s youngest investment banker, he would be alive today.”

David Sirota writes at In These Times in Four in five Americans believe in global warming–but nearly half of local weather reporters don’t:

[A] recent Rolling Stone magazine assessment of the local news scene found that “there's a shockingly high chance that your friendly TV weatherman is a full-blown climate denier.” The report cited a 2010 survey finding that in the vast wasteland of Ron Burgundys, only half of all local weather forecasters believe climate change is even happening, and fewer than a third acknowledge the scientific evidence proving that it is “caused mostly by human activities.” Not surprisingly, their forecasts often omit any discussion of climate change's effect on the weather systems, thus forfeiting a chance to properly contextualize severe weather events.

From the Harper's Index, February:

• Projected annual revenue Mexican drug cartels stand to lose from pot legalization in Colorado and Washington: $1,400,000,000 • Percentage rate at which Arcata, California, plans to tax excessive electricity use in an effort to punish marijuana growers: 45 • Percentage of children living in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture who have thyroid abnormalities: 40 • Number of hours before power was restored to the majority of Long Island residents affected by the storm: 361 • Estimated cost of maintaining Afghanistan’s national security forces in the year after U.S. troops leave: $4,100,000,000 • Annual budget of the Afghan government: $3,300,000,000 • Last full month in which the average daily temperature did not exceed twentieth-century norms: 2/1985

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—The Real Maverick in the Presidential Race:

By now, John McCain’s identity as a "maverick" has been pretty well demolished among thinking people, though it retains a tenacious grip on certain sectors of the media. In light of McCain’s support for overturning Roe v. Wade, his cave on torture, his hiring of significant numbers of Bush-Cheney staffers, his turn to Bush’s big donors, and, of course, the McCain doctrine of Iraq war escalation, you’d think that it would be the joke among journalists it is among bloggers, but what can I say? I guess they’re slow.   Those journalists so desperate for a maverick presidential candidate, though, should take a look at former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (pronounced Gra-VEL), a long-shot Democratic candidate for president. Like McCain, if elected, Gravel would be the oldest president. Like McCain, Gravel’s major political experience is in the US Senate (1969-1981). Gravel also is a veteran, having served in the Army in the Counter Intelligence Corps in the early 1950s.  And just as McCain's initial reputation was made on an act of Vietnam-era courage—refusing to be released from POW status early—in his past, so was Gravel's—entering the Pentagon Papers into the public record via his Senate subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds, and filibustering the renewal of the draft. But unlike McCain, Gravel is genuinely a maverick, with the good and the bad that comes with that status.

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Tweet of the Day:

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High Impact Posts. High Impact Posts for the Week. Top Comments. Overnight News Digest.

The past is always with us. We might think we've evolved beyond it, grown more sophisticated or grounded in the present, but it is there, every day, in our ordinary lives.

In the streets we walk, the stairs we step down in the morning, the shopping plazas we cross.

No one understands this more than Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, an amazing historical consultant based in the Netherlands, who through her remarkable photographic artistry has managed to merge the some of the most horrific memories of the past century with the mundane present.

Through her photographic art, which melds today's images of familiar places—mostly set in Amsterdam—with images of 70-years-ago Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Teeuwisse creates a haunting, visceral body of work that will never, ever leave you alone. Once seen, her work simply will not be easily forgotten.

The photograph that opened this post, for example, was a mash-up the two below, taken at a site she identifies as Nieuwe looierstraat, Amsterdam. The older picture was part of a serendipitous discovery, she explains on her Flickr page:

The old photo was part of a bunch of negatives I found on a fleamarket, I have been trying to find out more about the person who made the photos and the people in them. The owner worked in a factory, or even owned it. He took this photo of some of the workers in the factory sometime during World War two.

She's more than just a photographer; through her work she's also become something of an amateur detective. She says:

One of the wartime photos I found compared to the location today. I didn't know the location but when making the photo on the Reguliersgracht I decided to walk around and then discovered the other location as well. This is where the photo was taken, Nieuwe Looierstraat Amsterdam.

This photo might help me find out what factory these people really worked for and where it was.

Yes, a detective and an artist with an expertise in history. The results of this amazing combination can be found below the fold.

Beware. There are photos that will haunt you—oh, not gruesome, trust me. It's another sort of haunting entirely.

(Continue reading below the fold.)