Well, good morning and welcome once again to your Sunday morning chronicle of quickly typed reactions to stuff that happens on political prattle shows. My name is Jason. Happy Mothers day, to you all. Right off the bat, we have to hand it to Meet The Press, who last week actually managed to do something rare -- it had a moment of far-reaching relevance that actually impacted the world of politics. This is the Sunday Morning teevee equivalent of the "Miracle On Ice."
But hey, Joe Biden, out there, speaking his mind on marriage equality got a little idea snowballing, and pretty soon, the White House was abandoning whatever coldly calculated same-sex marriage rollout they had planned and President Obama was like, check it: now I am for this stuff, too. Okay! That was midway through the week, and I don't even know why other news was even trying to happen that day. Sorry, other news! We are going to all ride this Obama-is-for-marriage-equality pony until it gives out from exhaustion.
Anyway, y'all know what to do: crawl back into bed or go to church or brunch and let me HANDLE this. Meanwhile, you may also spend some time conversing in the comments, drop me a line, or follow me on Twitter, for other things.
FOX NEWS SUNDAY
Okay, well, we're mixing things up today on FNS. Shannon Bream is here, instead of Chris Wallace, and we're going to be talking with Dianne Feinstein about national security and John Thune about...being handsome and running for President for a minute. Plus paneling. Sweet numnums, the paneling!
But first, hey, we blocked some terrorist attack from Yemen, and DiFi is here to explain it to us. Yemen, by the way, is the hot new place to be a terrorist? Afghanistan is yesterday's news, dude. Time to start getting in on these boss terror timeshares in Zinjibar. DiFI says that AQAP -- that's "al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula" if you are nasty (or a cartographer) -- is the number one threat to the United States. Time was that "I'm going to Yemen" was a joke on the show FRIENDS. Now, Chandler Bing goes to Yemen to start jihad!
Anyway, a bomb was recovered, and this is an "impressive victory" and a "substantial win" for the CIA, but we've got to "end this now" because it could get "complicated." Oh, hey, nice to know things aren't complicated yet. It's just a SIMPLE matter of needing a whole new war in a whole other part of the world than the one in which we are already fighting out exhausting, endless war.
But all of this "news' comes in the form of a "leak," and so there's a "big" investigation going on now to catch the leaker. DiFi says that the leak came to an AP reporter, and the story was held for a period of time after officials asked. "The leak," DiFi says, "really did disrupt sources and methods," and she says someone will get prosecuted. If you can catch me! I mean...If you can catch them!
So, are we going to catch underwear bombs, ever? DiFi says that the bomb material is hard to detect and when you keep this junk in their drawers, it's not easy to discover during a pat down. The TSA, DiFi says, has to learn and adapt. What will probably happen is that we'll all have to travel in jumpsuits that give the TSA easy access to our taints, I'm guessing.
DiFi says that in Dubai, there is a "big patdown." They are just very handsy, there. The Herman Cain of airport security.
DiFi is hopeful that we kill this particular bombmaker, and his associates, because who will make bombs then? No one, probably.
Moving toward Afghanistan, DiFi says that what the Taliban has done is expand their "shadowy presence" as a governing entity, and now they are moving into the Northeast and are essentially running things. And killing people! "This demonstrates that the Taliban are just waiting to come back," DiFi says. She goes on to add that most people in the Karzai government obviously oppose the Taliban, but they are strong in various areas. And they are making mad bank of opium, as well. This is why we probably aren't actually pulling out of Afghanistan in 2014. DiFi says that the "key to Afghanistan is action by Pakistan," and yeah, that makes 2014 unlikely, too.
Still, DiFi is positive that we will make our timeline, and she has two reasons why she thinks that and neither is "she's crazy, like, down to the bones crazy, jittering and shivering and talking straight nonsense." No. Actually, she says that we're apparently making very good progress on training Afghan security forces, and these forces are "in the lead in many missions." Also, DiFi says, there are schoolgirls going to school without acid being thrown in their face. So, remember, you're junior high school experience probably wasn't the worst thing in the world.
Moving to marriage equality, now. Has Obama flip-flopped? DiFi says that he hasn't flip-flopped and that there is "no political calculus in this." Ha ha ha. Yes. But DiFi goes on to basically say that the more you get to meet members of the LGBT community, the more your views change and prejudices disappear.
Moving to Jamie Dimon, who got caught in the deep end of the derivative market after telling everyone he didn't need a liferguard, and ended up losing $2 billion on some ill-advised prop bets. Loser! Should Washington get involved, though? DiFi says that JPM getting into this hedge trouble was a surprise, and a "danger signal" that various rules need to get set.
DiFi then goes on to explain how budgets and allocations work in the Senate.
Next, John Thune, who Bream assures me is "one of the most mentioned names in the Veepstakes." Who is mentioning this?
At any rate, Thune is live from whatever Fox studio is lit to make it look like a white-hot beam of light is being projected onto the subjects face from the direction of his crotch.
We begin with JP Morgan's big losses, because Thune voted against Dodd-Frank and wants it repealed. (This, despite the fact that Dodd-Frank was pretty toothless.) Thune says that "we don't know all the facts" about JPM's big fail. Thune says that his problem with Dodd-Frank is with the "compliance burdens" it puts on small banks. He goes on to say that JPM's losses do suggest that we need "some safeguards in place." (He also reckons that regulators need to fully interpret and implement Dodd-Frank, which he is trying to repeal?)
Moving to gay marriage -- which, in some polls, seems to be beneficial to the President. Bream notes that Thune has obviously endorsed Romney who has obviously endorsed the idea of marriage being between a man and a woman. What will Romney do, now, to avoid being "unfair" to everyone? Thune just sort of says that Romney believes what he believes, and the election will probably hinge on the economy, and Romney wants to talk about the economy, and here are some talking points, to choke on.
Of course, Obama is WARBLOGGING against the GOP Congress, and has given them a to-do list...which they will NOT DO, because LOL, it's an election year. Which doesn't mean that some of this stuff shouldn't get done, like offering tax incentives to bring business home whilst cutting tax breaks that foster outsourcing. Why won't the GOP consider this? Thune doesn't know! He's like, why didn't he come out with this three years ago? We would have rejected it then. Anyway, Thune isn't having it, because Obama blocked the Keystone Pipeline and gave him a sad, along with "class war rhetoric."
But why can't we just end these incentives that foster job losses? BECAUSE THE TIMING WAS SUPER BAD. (Also, lobbyists tell John Thune not to.)
Bream wants to know about Dick Lugar's loss to Dick Mourdock, and Lugar straight going off on Mourdock about the way Mourdock is an ugly-minded partisan hack who won't work with anybody. Is Thune worried about losing that seat in the fall, because Mourdock is so terrible? Thune isn't. (And I think he's right to not be, Mourdock is likely to beat the Democratic nominee.) He then goes on to describe the Senate's overall dysfunction, without ironically noting that Lugar was nominally in favor of the Senate not being such a desolate chamber of hack-obstructionists diddling one another all day long.
[There will be more liveblog coming in just a few minutes. Probably, anyway. I mean, nothing in life is guaranteed.]
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