1. Still: Why the beads of sweat on Booker’s bald brow? The Newark Mayor shouldn’t take any of this for granted—if he’s really as smart as they say. Observers were stunned by the unexpected bid from Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver (D-Essex)—a crafty, holds-no-tongue North Jersey political queen and former teacher. Booker was supposed to have been the only African-American in the race. And while the Speaker’s entrance may appear quixotic at best, it could open up a can of stink for Booker particularly as it 1) relates to the black vote and 2) impacts his ability to charm the rest of North Jersey outside of Newark.
    Consequently, Oliver may hold the key to her home of Essex County—which, incidentally, holds Newark. It is the most densely populated county behind Hudson County neighboring New York City, holding some 800,000 residents and a piggy bank of crucial voting blocs. No one can win statewide in Jersey without Essex, and the entrance of Oliver just made that plan a lot more difficult for Booker.
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  2. Beltway cats might get all juiced up and creamy over Beltway jazz, but what about folks on the outside looking in?  This is all insider baseball, a very tedious game of bunts, balls and walks through long-inning game bullshit.  The president might feel like he’s fueling his swagger a bit, but that’s not really doing much for everyone else outside of Washington. Paul Krugman in the NY Times makes a good point when chiding politicians and policymakers about the (still) high unemployment rate we all seem eager to forget about: “[T]hey also need to start worrying about the right things — namely, the plight of the jobless and the immense continuing waste from a depressed economy.” Thus, most average folks might have some trouble relating to the significance of D.C. Circuit nominees and Executive Branch musical chairs.  These maneuvers don’t exactly connect the dots between what’s happening there and, say, what’s happening to average homeowners still underwater or the millions continually ass-out on sequestration-bombed unemployment benefits and the families losing LIHEAP funds.
    On those issues, the president is pretty much absent from the conversation while constantly brooding over Congressional obstruction and inviting healthy debates on NSA snooping.  Yet, he is the president, right? 
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  3. Gov. Chris Christie’s decision to pick fellow Republican state Attorney General Jeff Chiesa as the emergency placeholder won’t change the fiercely partisan Democratic machine’s perpetual hold on the seat. But as the Governor skillfully squeezed himself through a tight political fix by engineering what some observers were seeing as a slick win-win scenario, Democrats were left with a frenzied field of ambitious Garden State politicos making a bid for the open Senate seat.
    What was supposed to be, by most standards, a routine Senate race lost in the mix of many during the 2014 midterms has now morphed into a battle royal. Christie, according to many Jersey political observers, masterfully played his cards by setting the Democratic primary for August 13 and general election for October 16. With neither side of the political aisle pleased, Christie protected his own gubernatorial re-election bid while keeping his 2016 presidential prospects secured.
    No one was pleased — but sources say that was Christie’s point. National Republicans had hoped the notoriously keep-it-real Governor would simply make a GOP appointment that would keep the seat warm and competitive for 2014, thereby increasing their chances of snatching the Senate back from Democrats.
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  4. Democrats bank on a weary, politically shell-shocked public eventually punishing Republicans in 2014, compounded by the constant of changing demographic winds that conservatives can’t shake. Generic mid-term ballots showing Democrats nearly three points ahead of Republicans give progressives breathing space. Unemployment is still high, growth at snail’s pace, and the sticker shock on everything from gas pumps to grocery lines evident—yet, Congress is muddled in AP-‘Ghazi-Tax-Gate madness over the scraps under the kitchen table. Voters will lash out on that.
    But we’re still 18 months and stocks of unknown political problems away to make that assumption. Unaddressed is the second-term President presently stuck in a first-term mindset. Barack Obama has fantastically dropped the ball on messaging as “scandals” sucker-smack him from left jaw to right, his White House unable or just plain unwilling to put its elbow in it. 
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  5. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory press release reads like sterilized lines from a chemistry major’s textbook. You can’t mistake the stoic prose, a bucket full of technical alcohol splashed about to remove any sense of humanity from the person who wrote it. Make it worse, since Livermore is a government lab it’s more than certain that the final went through endless drafts and bureaucratic authorizations before we landed on the elongated “Livermore scientists develop CO2 sequestration technique that produces ‘supergreen’ hydrogen fuel, offsets ocean acidification.” What, if anything, did sequestration suddenly have to do with CO2? The two seem worlds apart, unless the science enthusiast who wrote the press release seemed adept enough at Search Engine Optimization to assume usage of a political buzzword would catch the eyeballs of a few otherwise dismissive reporters. 
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  6. Despite the scandal-fueled heat bubbling inside Washington these days, a recent stream of hard polling data suggests President Obama is riding steady. While the White House, clearly beleaguered, might seem under siege, numbers from the streets paint a different picture.
    Observers are still sticking to their too-early-to-tell assessments when asked about how much the triple whammy of controversies are impacting the administration and its ability to push a second term agenda. “I won’t defend the actions of these agencies, but it is clear that these actions were independent of the administration,” argues Democratic strategist and former Obama 2012 staffer Dan Siegel. “As more information comes out, we will see that while some individuals may have acted inappropriately, this isn’t a massive liberal conspiracy as some would like us to believe.”
    Siegel occasionally took the pulse of voters as he managed Philadelphia City Controller candidate Brett Mandel’s recent campaign. “I think the American people are beginning to take the Republican message with a big grain of salt,” says Siegel. “I think making Benghazi, for example, about Hilary Clinton is an example of taking a legislative issue and making it too clearly into a political play.”
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  7. But bitcoin brings along with it that funny feeling of adventurous, mostly White young urban professionals and complicit city governments who casually gentrify countless urban hoods and displace mostly working class or poor residents of color while at it. It might be an exciting tool of monetary convenience, but we’ve watched this episode before. Here we go again: another amazing marketplace innovation that increases the number of folks left out. Like credit reports and FICO scores, for example, that are leaving many individuals cut out of employment — the recession kicked a number of people in the ass in more ways that one; now, because of accumulated bad credit, we’re faced with a long-term unemployment crisis because a majority of employers are using credit reports to determine your eligibility for jobs that don’t require fiduciary or security responsibilities.
    With bitcoins and their legions of geeky, oblivious fanboys growing fast, someone needs to drop in on the scene like Blade crashing a basement vampire rave. Healthy and robust discourse on the subject, from talk shows to Forbes columnists living on it for a week, appear to rummage through every element of the phenomenon except for the most uncomfortable aspect about it. Yet to be heard or seen is any exchange on whether the shadowy and volatile bitcoin will end up becoming a fancy currency tool of a Gatsbian elite that will use it to access amenities the rest won’t be able to afford unless they have the keys to the bitcoin.
    Read more >>
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  8. In the tight gubernatorial race that is turning Virginia into the most watched electoral battlefield of 2013, all that now stands between GOP nominee and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is his running mate — a firebrand, Black, Republican minister known as Bishop E.W. Jackson.
    Jackson, a bombastic Christian evangelist who hails from the state’s Chesapeake area, has now become the unwitting face of the Virginia governor’s race — elevated from playing the usually lowkey role of a gubernatorial candidate running mate to now being the latest Black conservative sensation making waves on the national political landscape. The minister was recently picked by a resurgent caucus of tea party Republicans and evangelists at the state GOP’s recent political convention in Richmond.
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  9. It was, perhaps, the toughest week ever for the Obama administration — a week in which pop-culture comparisons to the ABC hit show “Scandal” did not go unnoticed and in which Republicans unleashed a spirited assault to uncover wrongdoing in the White House. With conservatives eagerly dropping hot button historical references such as “Watergate” for political effect, President Obama found himself fending off what seemed like an endless stream of fresh scandals.
    “The combination of three potentially explosive scandals threatens to swallow the Obama second term, sideline his agenda and energize Republican voters for the midterms,” warns Matt Mackowiak, president of Potomac Strategy Group. “With the media and congressional Republicans searching for new revelations, the investigations will consume much of the political oxygen in Washington for months.”
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  10. Many experts are pointing to credit checks and discrimination against the unemployed as a “silent crisis” being widely ignored by lawmakers on Capitol Hill. That problem could be exacerbating a stubborn above-average long-term jobless rate — even as Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures indicate a dropping unemployment rate now at 7.5 percent.
    However, the BLS rate won’t show long-term discouraged workers that, according to economist John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics, push the total unemployment rate to 23 percent.
    “People of color are more likely to have ‘poor credit’ because of historical and contemporary forms of discrimination that limit opportunities,” argues Hannah Emple, a policy analyst with the New America Foundation’s Asset Building Program. “A low credit score thus becomes more of a proxy for a person’s experience with discriminatory structures rather than a measure of their ability to repay loans in a responsible and timely manner.”
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