• He announced that ANWR should be declared wilderness (and thus be insulated from oil drilling, though he would also open up a number of blocks off the eastern seaboard for offshore drilling)
  
• He won't be meeting Netanyahu when he comes to speak to Congress in March. (More on that later)
  
• He has asked the FCC to neutralize state laws preventing municipal broadband.
  
• He would like to see companies provide 7 days of paid sick leave and 6 weeks of parental leave to their workers and will sign a memorandum to provide such to employees of the Executive Branch.
  
• He has announced that he'd like to see two free years of community college paid for with upper class tax hikes (though his plan to tax 529 plans has been walked back)
  
• Obama's budget will likely call for an end to the sequester.
  

• Nominations: Loretta Lynch seems increasingly likely to be confirmed. Not everyone is happy about this. Ashton Carter heads to his first confirmation hearings this week.
  
• Obamacare: Aside from announcing plans to vote to repeal it again, and sending the 40-hours-is-full-time bill to the Senate, not much has happened in Congress to reach Obama's desk. Legislation to exclude veterans from triggering the employer mandate is the closest to passage, having recently left committee in the Senate.
  
• Banking and Finance (and Terrorism): As expected, the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act was passed and signed, which included provisions to loosen certain provisions of Dodd-Frank. The House also recently passed a bill to delay the Volcker Rule and loosen derivatives regulations, among other changes. _{(Audit the Fed!)}
  
• Fiscal Cliff: The end of the debt ceiling moratorium arrives March 15. Expect talk to heat up about that later in the month. DHS is still unfunded past February, too (more on that in a bit). As for the FY2016 budget, Obama is preparing to submit his proposal to Congress in the next week or two. While he's suggested that he will lift the sequester (see above), there's basically no chance that anything in Obama's budget (other than maybe lifting the sequester on military funding) will make it to the final budget later this year, so take all of the impending budget-chat from politicos with a grain of salt. There might even be a token near-unanimous vote to dump it, like they did with his FY2013 budget. The next real movement there should be in April, when Rep. Tom Price's (R-GA) House Budget Committee announces and votes on their counter-proposal.
  
• Cybersecurity and Telecommunications: CISPA is back. Meanwhile, the FCC has stayed busy redefining broadband (throwing a kink into Comcast and Time Warner merger plans), and FCC chair Tom Wheeler has hinted that Title II reclassification may be in the cards. Republicans in Congress are not happy.
  
• Environment: As mentioned above, pending resolution of some minor textual changes to the Senate bill, Keystone XL will soon be on its way to Obama's desk.
  
• Immigration: After pulling the border security bill that was designed in part to allow Boehner to pass a relatively clean DHS funding bill (mentioned previously), Republicans are still mulling over plans on how they will react to Obama's executive amnesty. Democrats have threatened to filibuster anything but a clean DHS bill, however.
  
• The Torture Report and the NSA: The new chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), is not happy about that torture report being published and has demanded that the White House return all copies of the full report so that it can't be subject to FOIA. Incidentally, the CIA has cleared the CIA of having behaved improperly when spying on the aforementioned committee last year.
  
• Foreign Policy: Boehner breached protocol in inviting Netanyahu to speak to a joint session of Congress about the need for Iranian sanctions. Nancy Pelosi claims that the invitation was not done with bipartisan consultation. Even Fox News is critical of the move. Meanwhile, the Senate is preparing to pass a bill to strengthen Iranian sanctions in response to Obama's negotiations with the country. They have promised to hold off until the end of March to see if negotiations accomplish anything. The bill does, however, acknowledge that Israel has a right to defend itself, and states that Congress must approve any deal.
  
• Abortion: The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act was going to pass. Then it wasn't. It might come back, though. But don't worry, because even if it doesn't, the states will take up the true conservative cause. At least a bill to block all federal funding of abortion passed instead. Not that this made pro-life supporters any happier. Oh well, there are still 4 other bills out there to help fight the war for life! Oh, I meant 5 bills. Can't forget your standard mandatory ultrasound bill!
  
• Pee-pee, doo-doo, Obama is a bad president: Yes, the Republicans plan to sue Obama for executive amnesty, too.
  

• Already, talk about the 2016 elections is heating up. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker wowed in Iowa last week and Sarah Palin did too, albeit in a completely different way. Mitt Romney, another of the now nearly two dozen potential GOP candidates, didn't go, and shortly thereafter discovered that he had already lost the Invisible Primary. While discussions about such news in the USPol thread is inevitable, please remember that we do have a 2016 Presidential Primary thread and a 2016 Senate elections thread, too.
  
• While there are continuing protests in support of the idea that Black Lives Matter, there has still not yet been much popular movement to rein in police brutality and racism on a national scale.
  
• The largest measles outbreak in decades is still spreading, and fast. There's no estimate of when the outbreak will end, but hundreds of people in several hospitals in California and Arizona may have been exposed to several individuals who visited them, as well as a number of people on board an Amtrak train in New York.
  
• In order to get Medicaid expanded in Indiana, Obama agreed to let Indiana charge copays to Medicaid recipients and premiums to everyone above the federal poverty line (and deny vision and dental to anyone who doesn't pay, regardless of poverty status). Some pundits are wondering if it marks the beginning of the end for free Medicaid nationwide (first in the states that haven't yet expanded it, and then nationally when Republicans in the House and Senate pick up on it as a reform option).
  
• US and Cuban diplomats recently met and intend to continue talks about normalizing relations. Cuba's demand for the return of Guantanamo Bay may be a stumbling block, however.
  
• The US is still negotiating with Iran, too. Diplomats hope to finalize an agreement in July based on a framework agreed to by March.
  

• The Atlantic
  
  • "The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates
    
  • "The Tragedy of the American Military" by James Fallows
    

• Punishment and Inequality in America by Bruce Western
  
• The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America by Naomi Murakawa
  
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
  
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
  
• Matt Taibbi's
  
  • The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap and
    
  • Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History
    
• Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow
  
• Rick Perlstein's trilogy on the history of the modern conservative movement:
  
  • Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
    
  • Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
    
  • The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
    
• Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party by Geoffrey Kabaservice
  

• @costareports (Robert Costa, Washington Post, formerly National Review): Conservative-leaning journalist to whom Republican sources often leak backroom stories (Republican retreats, Presidential campaigns, etc.)
  
• @daveweigel (Dave Weigel, Bloomberg Politics, formerly Slate): "Idiosyncratic libertarian" journalist who is second only to Robert Costa in connections/interviews with Republican officials. Contrary to popular belief, not D&D superstar Joementum.
  
• @BruceBartlett (Bruce Bartlett, ex-Reagan/Bush official): "Lifelong conservative who now thinks the GOP panders to fools, whom he calls wankers. My tweets should not always be taken seriously."
  
• The following are semi-random selections from a list offered by Rygar201 and may be good or bad.
  
  • @owillis (Olivier Willis, research fellow, Media Matters)
    
  • @mattyglesias (Matt Yglesias, executive editor, Vox)
    
  • @JuddLegum (Judd Legum, Editor-in-Chief, Think Progress)
    
  • @dick_nixon "37th President of the United States. Messages from the President are unsigned, others from Ronald Ziegler. "
    
  • @EricBoehlert (Eric Boehlert, Media Matters)
    
  • @JamilSmith (Jamil Smith, senior editor, The New Republic)
    
  • @jonathanchait (Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine)
    
  • @nielslesniewski (Neils Lesniewski, Senate coverage, Roll Call)
    
  • @abwhite7 (Abraham White, former comms for Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), Chuck Schumer (D-NY))
    
  • @DSenFloor (Senate D Floor Watch): "Live floor updates from the Senate Democrats"
    
  • @billmon1 (Billmon)
    
  • @ebruenig (Elizabeth Bruenig, The New Republic)
    

ComradeCosmobot fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Feb 12, 2015

ComradeCosmobot fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Feb 1, 2015