Susan Rice Pulls Out of State

MSNBC
To explain why U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice pulled out of consideration for the secretary of state post, it’s important to remember this: A president only gets a finite number of fights with Congress, especially in the first year of a second term (which may be the last BIG year a president can win fights with Congress). Appointing Rice as secretary of state was going to be a fight, no doubt about it. Sometimes the path of least resistance is the smart play. And Rice made that very point in her interview on “Rock Center” with NBC’s Brian Williams: “I didn't want to see a confirmation process that was very prolonged -- very politicized, very distracting, and very disruptive. Because there are so many things we need to get done as a country.” Remember, Obama and his team have always been pragmatists, though that pragmatism also brings criticism like this Buzzfeed piece entitled, “Obama Shows Weakness, Again:”
     "Susan Rice is essentially a repeat of Gitmo in 2009," a former Obama administration official emailed moments after Susan Rice withdrew her name for secretary of state Thursday afternoon. "You have to give up on her because the politics are so bad that the White House thinks it can't win. But the politics are so bad because they spent too long not fighting for it and instead just watching things get worse. Self-fulfilling."   READ FULL ARTICLE

Editor's Note: (1) Rice was never explicitly Obama's first choice and, (2) nominating someone for a post as important as secretary of sate just to win a political fight with John McCain would make the president look as stupid and transparently self-serving as McCain does.   READ FULL ARTICLE

The Media Will Quickly Forget About Guns

WASHINGTON POST
Within hours of the murder Friday of 26 schoolchildren, staff and a principal in Newtown, Conn., the political debate had been joined. President Obama, speaking through tears, called for “meaningful action” to prevent future horrors like the one witnessed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Advocates of gun control have demanded new legislation, and now.
     The challenges for gun control proponents are formidable. There is the influence of the gun lobby on Capitol Hill. And in particular, a public that in recent years has not only grown less supportive of more gun restrictions, at least in the abstract, but also doesn’t care about the issue. In a post-election Gallup survey, fewer than one-half of one percent of Americans said that guns were the nation’s “most important problem.”
     One reason the issue lacks salience is that citizens tend to take their cues from the media. When news outlets devote significant attention to an issue – health care or national security, for example – the public comes to view those problems as pressing. With the deluge of economic news over the last year, it’s no surprise that 64 percent of the Gallup respondents said the economy was the nation’s most important problem.
     But as Brad Plumer and Dylan Byers have pointed out, news coverage of gun control is rare and particularly sporadic, even in the aftermath of widely publicized mass shootings. And that makes the prospects for a renewed public debate over gun control dim, although not extinguished entirely.  READ FULL ARTICLE