* The dominos continue to fall.
Despite bitter resistance in Oklahoma for years to President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, Republican leaders in this conservative state are now confronting something that alarms them even more: a huge $1.3 billion hole in the budget that threatens to do widespread damage to the state’s health care system.
So, in what would be the grandest about-face among rightward leaning states, Oklahoma is now moving toward a plan to expand its Medicaid program to bring in billions of federal dollars from Obama’s new health care system.
* Democrats are more than ready to play the “woman card” in 2016.
If Democrats take back the Senate in 2016, they’ll likely have women to thank for it.
The party is likely to have at least six female nominees who are challenging Republican incumbents in their top-targeted states, helping them flip the four seats necessary to take back Senate control, if Democrats hold the White House.
And Democrats believe they have the perfect storm brewing to help them do that — likely the first female presidential nominee coupled with a probable GOP nominee who has a well-documented history of controversial remarks about women.
* Perhaps you heard that Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been on a twitter rampage against Donald Trump. Recognizing that we’re probably in the minority on this one, I tend to agree with Charles Blow about how effective that has been.
It has been somewhat fascinating and sometimes fun to watch Elizabeth Warren do battle with Donald Trump in alternating salvos of tweets, but in the end I fear that this approach of trying to “beat a bully,” as Warren put it in one of her tweets, is a futile effort.
There is no way to sufficiently sully a pig or mock a clown. The effort only draws one further onto the opponent’s turf and away from one’s own principles and priorities.
There is no way to shame a man who lacks conscience or to embarrass an embarrassment. Trump is smart enough to know what he lacks — substance — and to know what he possesses in abundance — insolence.
So long as he steers clear of his own weakness and draws others in to the brier patch that is his comfort, he wins.
* I’m pretty neutral on the topic about whether Bernie Sanders should drop out of the Democratic primary before all the states have weighed in. But after the mess that erupted at the Nevada Democratic Convention this weekend, Charles Pierce says it’s time for him to go.
…this whole mess was over four freaking delegates, and the Sanders people should know better than to conclude what has been a brilliant and important campaign by turning it into an extended temper tantrum.
I voted for Bernie Sanders. I even wrote about why I did here at this very shebeen. But if anybody thinks that, somehow, he is having the nomination “stolen” from him, they are idiots.
* Adam Gopnik writes about President Obama’s brand of liberalism.
His words have been varied, but his purpose has been consistent and his point simple: liberalism isn’t centrism. It isn’t a way of splitting the differences between two sides, and finding an acceptable soft middle. Liberalism of the kind he practices, the President has been saying, is the most truly radical of ideologies, inasmuch as it proposes a change, makes it happen, and then makes it last.
* Finally, insert your favorite teacher/prophet and think about this…
