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Aaand, scene. RT @ryanjreilly: Mitt Romney apparently mixed up Donna Brazile and Gwen Ifill http://t.co/kChjqA5pO0 / #headdesk
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) July 26, 2014
Ahead on the 7/25/14 Maddow show
Tonight's guests:
- Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, has been working with House Veterans Affairs Committee chairman, Florida congressman Jeff Miller, to hammer out a compromise V.A. reform bill
- Jen Moreno, staff attorney for the Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic
And here's senior producer Cory Gnazzo with tonight's preview:
Friday's Mini-Report, 7.25.14
Today's edition of quick hits:
* A pause? "Israel has offered to halt fighting for 12 hours in Gaza, a senior U.S. official said Friday. The pause in fighting would begin at 7 a.m. Saturday (12 a.m. ET), the official said. It was not immediately clear whether Hamas would also cease hostilities. Word of the offer came shortly after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said talks aimed at a seven-day humanitarian cease-fire in the Gaza Strip were bogged down in disagreement over 'some terminology.'"
* "Day of Rage": "Violence spread to the West Bank on Friday as enraged Palestinians protested Israel's continuing military offensive in Gaza. At least five Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli security forces, according to Palestinian medical officials and local news reports, adding to the explosive atmosphere in the region and raising the specter of further unrest."
* Ukraine: "Russia has stepped up its direct involvement in fighting between the Ukranian military and separatist insurgents, unleashing artillery attacks from Russian territory and massing heavy weapons along the border, Ukrainian and American officials say."
* Border crisis: "President Obama said Friday that migrant children who cross the border and do not have 'proper claims' will be sent back to their home countries."
* More on this on tonight's show: "The House on Friday passed a resolution requiring authorization from Congress for a sustained presence of combat troops in Iraq."
* Heartbreaking: "The doctor leading Sierra Leone's fight against the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history has contracted the virus himself, government officials said. Sheik Umar Khan, 39, was on the front lines of battling the disease that has so far claimed 632 lives in three West African states, according to the World Health Organization. He is credited with treating more than 100 victims. And now he is one himself."
* Occasionally, Republicans can be shamed into talking: "Key lawmakers are back at work on a possible deal to reform the Veterans Affairs Department, just one day after the talks appeared to break down."
* Maybe the FAA's decision wasn't the result of a partisan conspiracy: "An Air Canada flight was forced to circle Tel Aviv, after rockets were fired at Ben Gurion International Airport on Friday, The Toronto Star reports."
* Someone should let Darrell Issa know: "The federal watchdog tasked with enforcing the Hatch Act has cleared the White House's political affairs office of any wrongdoing in violation of the 20th century law that bars political activity by executive branch employees."
* When the right screws up U.S. diplomacy for no reason: "Sen. Ted Cruz will still hold all State Department nominations despite the fact that it could further delay the U.S. posting an ambassador to Russia, his office said on Friday."
* Dear conservatives, if your entire argument for taking health care benefits away from millions is an example of Jonathan Gruber making a mistake, then you've already lost.
An 'intensely awkward congressional hearing'
Earlier this month, in a clumsy moment, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) lambasted U.S. customs official Thomas Winkowski. But there was a problem: McCain meant to shout at R. Gil Kerlikowske, a different U.S. customs official with a name that was kinda sorta similar.
It was an embarrassing exchage, but on the cringe-worthy spectrum, McCain's confusion was nothing compared to this story, reported yesterday by John Hudson.
In an intensely awkward congressional hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday, freshman Rep. Curt Clawson misidentified two senior U.S. government officials as representatives of the Indian government.The two officials, Nisha Biswal and Arun Kumar, are Americans who hold senior positions at the State Department and Commerce Department, respectively. Although both Biswal and Kumar were introduced as U.S. officials by the chairman of the Asia and Pacific subcommittee, Clawson repeatedly asked them questions about "your country" and "your government," in reference to the state of India.
The video is hard to watch, but it's also hard to look away.
A poor messenger with a dubious message
If persistence mattered more than accuracy, then Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) would be extremely well positioned to expand his base of support to traditional Democratic constituencies. After all, the Kentucky Republican rarely misses an opportunity to make his pitch to organizations committed to civil rights and the interests of minority communities.
Benjy Sarlin reports today, for example, that Paul talked up his agenda at a civil rights conference in Ohio this morning.
"I say we take a stand and fight for justice now," said the Republican senator from Kentucky. The speech to the National Urban League's conference in Cincinnati was part of a broader campaign by Paul to engage with minority voters ahead of a likely presidential run. [...]"Not only do I support the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, I'm a Republican who wants to restore a federal role for the government in the Voting Rights Act," Paul said.
On a surface level, that sounds like exactly the kind of message progressives and proponents of civil rights find appealing.
It's what happens when we look just below the surface that Rand Paul runs into trouble.
The real party of civil rights
About once a year, the right will roll out a stale argument: Republicans are the real party of civil rights, because Southern Democrats supported segregation during the civil-rights fights in the middle of the 20th century. National Review's John Fund walked the well-traveled ground this week.
Fund's piece was essentially an advertisement for a booklet published by the conservative American Civil Rights Union titled "The Truth About Jim Crow.""Available for free at TheTruthAboutJimCrow.org, it sets the record straight on a hidden racial past that many Democrats would rather see swept under the carpet," Fund raved.Fund went on to invoke arguments familiar to anyone who's heard a conservative try to explain why Democrats are the real racists, reminding readers that Woodrow Wilson had a horrible record on race relations, that a larger percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and that the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Jay Bookman took a closer look at the pamphlet Fund's piece was promoting, highlighting some of its more glaring errors of fact and judgment.
What's more Jamelle Bouie notes that it's curious that National Review would push this line, given its own history: "It would be nice if Fund had reckoned with National Review's early defense of segregation, including William F. Buckley's assertion that 'the cultural superiority of White over Negro' is a 'fact that obtrudes' and that 'National Review believes that the South's premises are correct.... It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.'"
But let's dig deeper still, highlighting the historical details and context that's invariably ignored by the right every time they broach this subject.
GOP lawmakers balk at Pentagon's climate concerns
In general, when Defense Department leaders alert Congress to a national-security threat, we expect Republican lawmakers to take it seriously. Rebecca Leber reported this week, however, Pentagon concerns about climate change affecting military operations are being ignored by GOP officials.
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing [on Tuesday], a Department of Defense representative laid out how climate change is exposing its infrastructure in coastal and Arctic regions to rising sea levels and extreme weather, and that it's even impacting decisions like which types of weapons the Pentagon buys. This is only the latest in a series of recent warnings from the military, which raised the issue as far back as George W. Bush's second term.In March, the Pentagon warned, in its Quadrennial Defense Review, that the effects of climate change "are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions -- conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence." In other words, increased drought and water shortages are likely to trigger fighting over limited resources.
What's striking is the Republicans' indifference. In fact, it's worse than indifference -- GOP lawmakers aren't just ignoring the Pentagon's concerns about climate and national security; they're actually pushing hard in the other direction.
Kate Sheppard noted a few months ago that House Republicans "passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization bill ... that would bar the Department of Defense from using funds to assess climate change and its implications for national security."
Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.), the sponsor of the measure, argued at the time, "The climate is obviously changing; it has always been changing. With all the unrest around the [world], why should Congress divert funds from the mission of our military and national security to support a political ideology?"
The answer, of course, is that climate change and national security, whether the right chooses to acknowledge this or not, are inextricably linked. Telling U.S. military leaders they must bury their heads in the sand because congressional Republicans say so won't help.