Elizabeth Warren Wins Endorsement of Massachusetts Democrats; Won’t Face Primary Opponent

Posted: June 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , | 37 Comments

Elizabeth Warren has won the endorsement of the Massachusetts Democratic Party at their Convention today in Springfield. She is now the official candidate of the Party and will not need to face a primary opponent.

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren won her party’s overwhelming endorsement on Saturday, shutting out a potential primary election opponent and becoming the presumptive nominee to face Republican Sen. Scott Brown in what is expected to one of the nation’s most expensive and closely-watched Senate races.

Warren won the votes of 95.7 percent of the more than 3,500 delegates to the state Democratic convention, the largest margin of any candidate in a contested race in the party’s history.

Marisa DeFranco, an immigration attorney from Middleton, had waged a longshot campaign for Senate but finished far below the 15 percent she needed under party rules to get on the September primary ballot. Democratic party chair John Walsh had said as early as Saturday morning that he expected DeFranco to reach the threshold.

Warren is still dealing with the Breitbart-inspired attacks on her claim of Native American ancestry, and she referred to right wing smear campaign in a a “feisty” speech today, according to The New York Times.

“It’s a long way from Ted Kennedy to Scott Brown,” Ms. Warren said in a feisty speech here on Saturday to the roughly 3,500 delegates to the state convention, invoking the name of the lionized Democrat. Mr. Kennedy’s death in 2009 led to the special election in which Mr. Brown won the seat.

She also dismissed the controversy in which her campaign has been mired for more than a month — whether she unfairly claimed American Indian ancestry to advance her academic career.

“If that’s all you’ve got, Scott Brown, I’m ready,” she declared to cheers. “And let me be clear. I am not backing down. I didn’t get in this race to fold up the first time I got punched.”

Hang in there, Liz! You’ve got what it takes.

Leave Elizabeth Warren Alone!

Posted: May 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , | 30 Comments

Quixote wants the media to leave Ann Romney alone. In that spirit, I say it’s time for the media to get off Elizabeth Warren’s back about her Cherokee ancestry. Good Grief! This is the woman who stood up to Wall Street, Barack Obama, and Tim Geithner. Now she has to prove she’s 1/32 Cherokee?

Guess what? The Chief of Cherokee Nation is only 1/32 Cherokee. That ought to be good enough to satisfy the corporate media, although nothing will ever satisfy the right wing nuts, as we know from their continued demands to see a different birth certificate than Barack Obama has already provided.

Just plug in “Elizabeth Warren” on Google News, and all you’ll see are headlines about Warren’s Native American heritage, as if it mattered one bit as to her qualifications to serve in the Senate. Here are a few examples:

Elizabeth Warren’s Cheekbones

Elizabeth Warren shuts the door on Herald’s inquiry

Who’s an American Indian? Warren Case Stirs Query

And in the midst of the madness, it looks like Warren is going to have to deal with a primary challenger.

At the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky calls it a “witch hunt,” and I agree with him. He calls it “the biggest media-manufactured story since the Lewinsky scandal.”

So now Elizabeth Warren has to prove that she’s 1/32nd Cherokee? The temperature on the story is rising. There was a huge article in the Boston Globe on Friday written to raise a number of questions and suggest that Warren used the minority designation to get her job, or get ahead—exactly at the same time that a poll was released (PDF) showing that 69 percent of Bay State voters don’t consider her heritage to be a “significant” story. It reminds me of nothing so much as Monica Lewinsky, and of the media’s need sometimes to get a grip.

Why Lewinsky? The situations are in fact almost precisely the same. You had then a press pack that had decided that whether Bill Clinton was telling the truth about Monica was a question on which the fate of the republic hinged. The press became self-righteously consumed with its search for The Truth. Meanwhile, outside the Beltway, and outside of Wingnuttia (it existed then, just at about half of its current GDP), nobody cared what the truth was. The media kept producing revelations; surely, now, swore Maureen Dowd and Michael Kelly, America will see this man for the reprobate he is! America looked, yawned, told the press to start acting like grownups, and continued to approve of the job Clinton was doing as president at rates near 70 percent and to oppose impeachment at similar levels.

The appearance Thursday morning of this Suffolk University poll (linked to above) made me think: Well, this story line is about to wrap up. If more than two-thirds of voters don’t care, then that’s that. But no—still going strong! And now it’s not the loopy, right-wing, and pro-Brown Herald, which pushed the story first, but the Globe trying to play catch up. Yes, yes, it’s all in the public interest. What, you say, the public says it isn’t interested? Well, we’ll teach them what’s in their interest!

This is sheer insanity.

Super Tuesday Reads

Posted: March 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, birth control, Foreign Affairs, Israel, Mitt Romney, morning reads, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , | 59 Comments

Good Morning!!

Today is the day Willard Mitt Romney has been working toward since 1994 when he first ran for the Senate against Ted Kennedy. Think of the hundreds of millions of dollars he has poured into his dream of winning the presidency, only to end up on Super Tuesday 2012 with a 28% favorability rating according to the latest NBC-WSJ poll (h/t Dakinikat). Nevertheless, Romney could be the inevitable candidate after tonight–at least the Republican “establishment,” such as it is, hopes he will be.

As you can see in the image above, there are 437 delegates at stake today in the ten Super Tuesday states–that’s more than a third of the total delegates needed to win the Republican nomination.

My home state of Massachusetts holds its primary today, but I’ll be voting on the Democratic side for Elizabeth Warren for Senate. I’m actually getting a little worried about her now that Scott Brown has been leading in the polls for a couple of weeks now.

It looks like Romney will win easily here anyway. In fact, according the Washington Post, “Mass. Republicans hope a big Romney primary win Tuesday could put state into play in November”

Polls show Romney with a commanding lead among GOP primary voters here. His Republican challengers — Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich — have put little money or effort into the state.

But those same polls show Romney trailing President Barack Obama by double digits in a state that has traditionally shunned Republican presidential candidates.

Massachusetts Republicans are hoping that Romney will be able to buck that trend by reeling in voters in the state he governed for four years.

“He’ll put Massachusetts in play,” said state Republican Party Chairman Bob Maginn.

I sure hope not! Romney isn’t popular here, and he wasn’t popular as governor. But if the state ends up being competitive, I guess I’ll have to bite the bullet and vote for Obama.

Nate Silver was posting Super Tuesday updates all day yesterday, and his predictions are laid out in a sidebar at his blog. He is forecasting wins for Romney in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Virginia. He expects Santorum to win Wisconsin, Tennesee, Oklahoma, and Gingrich to win his home state of Georgia.

As for the caucus states of North Dakota, Vermont, Idaho, and Alaska, which account for 87 delegates Silver’s colleague Micah Cohen says anything could happen.  Personally, I think Romney should take Vermont, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Paul or Santorum take North Dakota.

Over at Real Clear Politics you can see a table showing all of the latest Super Tuesday polls.  Of course we’ll be live blogging the results tonight here at Sky Dancing, so please join us!

Soooo …. Here are a few headlines to get the big day started.

Howard Fineman says the Republican Party has become America’s First Religious Party

Whatever happens on Super Tuesday, the Republican primary season already has made history. The contest has confirmed the establishment of America’s first overtly religious major political party.

The signs are numerous, but it’s still easy to miss the big picture: that the GOP now is best understood as the American Faith Party (AFP) and its members as conservative Judeo-Christian-Mormon Republicans. The basement of St. Peter’s is just one clubhouse.

“There has never been anything like it in our history,” said Princeton historian Sean Wilentz. “‘God’s Own Party’ now really is just that.”

Fineman says most people don’t seem too thrilled by this idea. Duh!

The new GOP does not seem to be sitting well with the American people as a whole, or even with many traditional Republicans. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine is only the latest non-AFP-type Republican to decide to leave politics and/or the party. In the new ruling class, “revival tent” proponents are driving out the old “big tent” advocates. And a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that 40 percent of American adults think less of the party after watching its transformation this electoral season.

Will this spell the end of the GOP?

I happened to watch Hardball last night and to my horror, I saw Willard Mitt Romney in Tennessee reciting the words to an old song I recall from my childhood (but would have preferred to leave there), “Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier.”  It came from a Disney movie of the same name. Charlie Pierce hated it too.

Romney is the personification of the word “dork.”

It turns out Ann Romney may have the same problem as her husband. She can’t help making remarks about being rich. Yesterday she appeared on Fox News and claimed, “I don’t even consider myself wealthy.”

Yeah, that’s “an interesting thing.” I wish she’d send me some of the $21 million the Romneys took in last year. Ann Romney is beginning to remind me of Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom.

Just one more Romney link: Sam Stein found a debate from 2008 in which Romney said he likes health care insurance mandates. Romney’s spokesman said it’s not a flip flop. You be the judge. Frankly, I don’t see how Romney can recall which side of an issue he’s on from one minute to the next.

There’s an embarrassing story from Rick Santorum’s history at Huffpo by Jason Cherkis.

For a brief moment Monday afternoon, GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum jettisoned his conservative, culture-warrior talking points to make a down-to-earth connection with Ohio voters. He confessed that as a teenager, he used to cross the Ohio border to buy beer because the state’s legal drinking age was 18. “I used to enjoy going to Ohio,” he said.

That’s funny. We used to do that in Indiana too. Ohio’s drinking age for 3.2 beer was 16 in those days. It was pretty weak stuff but you could still get a buzz from it if you drank enough.

"Rooster" with his frat brothers

Before he lived in the fraternity house, Santorum lived in a dorm in the center of Penn State’s University Park campus. During his junior year, he roomed with John Koury. “We literally rolled kegs down the dormitory floor,” Koury recalled.

Their room became a party room. “On Fridays, when everyone got back from class, we’d go get a quarter-keg from the distributor,” Koury told HuffPost. “There’d be 20 or 30 of us in the room. We’d drink it and go down to the dining hall.”

Everybody called him “Rooster.” And Rooster liked to chug.

Moving on…. Yesterday must have been the day for wives to defend their husbands. Ann Romney gave an interview to Fox, and Karen Santorum defended her husband’s attitudes toward women for Tuesday’s CBS This Morning.

“They try to corner him and make it look like he doesn’t know anything else” other than conservative social values, Santorum told CBS News political correspondent Jan Crawford in an interview for “CBS This Morning.” “As a wife, mother, an educated woman, it frustrates me that they try to do that.”

She said it’s “unfortunate” that the media tries to “corner” her husband on issues like contraception.

Maybe if he didn’t keep ranting about it all the time, they’d stop asking him about it.

“My husband is brilliant, he knows so much about — you know, like I said — national security, jobs, the economy,” she told Crawford. “You know, every aspect of this race, any issue out there, he’s brilliant.”

Yeah, right. If her husband is “brilliant,” he sure does a good job of hiding it. She also complained about many people’s reaction to the couple’s decision to take their dead 20-month fetus home to show their children.

“We brought Gabriel home from the hospital to have a funeral mass and to bury him. And so they twist it and make it sound like it was some crazy thing,” she said. “We brought him home from the hospital to introduce him to our kids and place him, it was for the funeral mass and the burial. And what is so sad to me Jan is that no one can tell me how to grieve, and I’m not going to tell anyone else how to grieve. It’s not right.”

Well she might not tell anyone how to grieve, but she and her husband seem to wants to tell the rest of us we can’t use birth control or have access to abortion and that women should home school their children instead of working for a living. The Santorums both have martyr complexes. IMO, they should quit whining, live their lives they way they want to, and leave the rest of us alone.

Good old Ron Paul made a bit of news yesterday when he said victims of the recent tornadoes shouldn’t get any federal help.

As Midwestern states face the aftermath of last week’s severe tornado outbreak, Ron Paul said victims of the storms should not look to the federal government for help.

The Texas Republican has often criticized the Federal Emergency Management Agency, because, as he says, “they just get in the way.” He made this same argument Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley regarding the recent tornado-spawned devastation in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and several other states.

“To say that any accident that happens in the country, send in FEMA, send in the money, the government has all this money, it’s totally out of control and it’s not efficient,” he said.

Paul argued that the money FEMA spends for disaster relief is stolen from the states and tax payers and is ultimately wasteful.

What a nasty, mean old man! He’s building up some really bad karma.

I know I should have dug up some news about Newt Gingrich too, but I couldn’t find much. He’ll have a nice night in Georgia tonight I guess, and then probably will fade into the sunset.

Other than the primaries, the big story in the news is the conflict between Obama and Netanyahu over attacking Iran, which I find so depressing that I don’t even want to think about it. You can read about it at the link. And here’s a bonus. Mitt Romney has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post called “How I would check Iran’s nuclear ambition.”

So that’s it for me. What are you reading and blogging about today? And don’t forget to join us this evening as we discuss the results of the Super Tuesday contests!

The Problem With Peace Treaties [Of the Political Kind]

Posted: February 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 primaries, Democratic Politics, Elections, Elizabeth Warren Campaign, Republican politics, Scott Brown | Tags: , , | 7 Comments

It was sweet while it lasted, a lean across the Great Divide by two political opponents, namely Elizabeth Warren running for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts and Scott Brown, hoping to keep that seat planted firmly under his fanny.

The agreement was sensible after an early barrage of negative political ads. Karl Rove’s group first claimed Warren was a secret socialist, her blood line running straight to Stalin [the Matriarch of Mayhem], which evolved into an accusation that she was somehow a sympathetic friend to Wall St. financial institutions.  No doubt the banks did a double take.  Conversely, Warren’s admirers claimed that Brown was financed by those same financial institutions [which happens to be true].  He also claimed that the press was giving Elizabeth Warren a free ride, not hitting her with the really ‘hard’ questions.

Whining appears to be a Republican strategy for 2012.

Nonetheless, both parties agreed to reject the outside, 3rd party organizations funding these less than complimentary videos, ads and press releases.  But as history tells us, ceasefires and negotiations are dicey at best.  Even signed treaties can have gaping loopholes.

Such is the case in this wobbly agreement [hattip to TPM].  The Boston Globe reported earlier this week that Warren’s people were breaking the pledge by allowing an unflattering website, Rethink Brown.com, to surface in an expanded form.  The site displays several of Scott Brown’s quotes.

What are these quotes?  So, glad you asked.

The first statement is: “I go to Washington representing no faction, no special interest . . . ”

The quote is from Brown’s victory speech the night he won the Massachusett’s Senate seat in 2010.  Full quote:

I go to Washington as the representative of no faction or interest, answering only to my conscience and to the people. I’ve got a lot to learn in the Senate, but I know who I am and I know who I serve. I’m Scott Brown. I’m from Wrentham. I drive a truck, and I’m nobody’s senator but yours.

The comment is dated January 19, 2010 and fits nicely into Brown’s debate performance, where he corrected a moderator, regarding the former Senate seat:

With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedys’ seat and it’s not the Democrats’ seat.  It’s the People’s Seat.

That single comment literally turned Brown and his handsome mug into household familiars.  It was a star moment.

The dirty trick is that Elizabeth Warren jumped into the 2012 race and turned things upside down.  The recent complaint, the way this rabble-rousing, pro-Warren website is smearing Scott Brown, thereby breaking the peace accord and the public’s love affair?   The website places Scott Brown’s own words against facts, then properly cites and corroborates them.

For instance, the unfortunate fact that Scott Brown has accepted $1.1 million from Wall St. contributions, ferreted out by Center for Responsive Politics.  Or that Brown used his swing vote to water down Wall St. regulations, a story reported by the Boston Globe.  Or that Forbes magazine cited Scott Brown as one of Wall St’s favorite congressmen, with the article provided for reading pleasure.

Not only that but the Rethink Brown site manages to wiggle around the deal’s agreement because it’s not paid advertising, simply a group making a rather pointed statement on its own site.

Dastardly!

Color me suspicious when Brown claims these revelations break the spirit of the agreement, that this is just a way of peddling lies and misinformation.  Where are the lies?  What is the misinformation?

There’s a vast difference in pointing out a candidate’s contradictions to bold-face fiction and prevarication.  I would consider the latter approach the sort of thing Karl Rove’s GPS Crossroads’ group relies on consistently.

As for my suspicions?  No sooner did the Globe article come out ‘exposing’ Rethink Brown.com than the Massachusetts GOP launched an anti-Warren ad [also not covered under the agreement].

Okay.  That’s true.  Warren has done very well for herself. I can’t confirm the numbers but Elizabeth Warren is certainly no longer struggling financially. The comment on the Lawrence O’Donnell show?  What sort of wealthy was she speaking of—the top 1%, the top 5, 10, 20?  We don’t know from this video because we don’t have the entire clip.   But here’s the complete quote:

You know, I’m with you on this. Either don’t own it or put it in a blind trust, you know, where someone else manages it and you literally can’t see what’s in there. I realize there are some wealthy individuals — I’m not one of them — but some wealthy individuals who have a lot of stock portfolios. But you’re exactly right. I don’t understand how people can be out there in the House, in the Senate, they get inside information and they’re making critical decisions. We need to feel like they’re making those decisions on our behalf, not as an investor who would do better if the law goes this way instead of that way. I agree.

How clever.  They chopped off the ‘qualifier.’  Warren is not a wealthy individual of the sort who has a lot of stock portfolios, which would cloud her legislative judgment.  This was a discussion about insider trading and conflict of interest.  But look how easy it is to draw an inference—Warren lied about her wealth. She’s a wealthy woman. Oooooo.

And this is a Republican attack?

In fairness to Scott Brown he has a 2-year record he needs to support—things he said, things he did.  As for Elizabeth Warren?  She too has a record in Washington where she stood for protecting consumers against unfair business practices and how she developed then midwifed a Financial Protection Bureau into being, one to protect consumers in those same deals and contracts.  She’s also said quite bluntly that the American people got a raw deal in the economic debacle of 2008.  I don’t recall her ever saying Americans shouldn’t strive for success or eschew all monetary reward.  What I remember Warren stating unequivocally is that successful individuals are obligated to pay their fair share to the system that made their success uniquely possible.  Including the 1%.  Why?  Because it’s equitable.

Mr. Brown, I have nothing against you personally.  You seem like a perfectly nice man.  But tell your ad-meisters to use the truth-o-meter next time out.

And do yourself a personal favor—stop the whining.  It’s extremely unattractive.

Thursday Reads

Posted: January 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, Mitt Romney, morning reads, Psychopaths in charge, Republican presidential politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

Good Morning!!

I’m still in shock from the realization that Willard “Mitt” Romney is most likely going to be the Republican nominee. I never thought the day would come when a candidate would appear who is more soulless, more shallow, more banal, and less prepared to be president than Barack Obama. But Romney is all those things. I don’t think he knows any more about politics or economics than Donald Trump, and he’s just as much of a blowhard. What could possess anyone to vote for him? The American experiment has truly failed when these two psychopaths are the choices to lead the nation.

I was looking forward to Newt Gingrich’s attacks on Romney’s corporate raider past, but as Minkoff Minx reported last night, someone got to Newt and told him to cool it.

Newt Gingrich on Wednesday suggested his attacks on rival Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital have not been rational – though a spokesman insisted Gingrich is not backing off the attacks.

Gingrich’s comment came after a voter in Spartanburg, South Carolina, told Gingrich that he believed the former House speaker has “missed the target on the way you’re addressing Romney’s weaknesses.”

“I want to beg you to redirect and go after his obvious disingenuosness about his conservatism and lay off the corporatist versus the free market,” said the voter.

Gingrich replied: “I agree – I agree with you.”

“I think it’s an impossible theme to talk about with Obama in the background,” Gingrich continued. “Obama just makes it impossible to talk rationally in that area because he is so deeply into class warfare that automatically you get an echo effect which, as a Reagan Republican it frankly never occurred to me until it happened. So I agree with you entirely.”

Gingrich, who has harshly criticized Romney for his record at Bain, seemed to be saying he cannot “talk rationally” about Romney’s record because of the way Mr. Obama frames the issue.

He sure doesn’t sound rational there. I can’t figure out what he’s even trying to say. But it sounds like he’s claiming that somehow Obama made him attack Romney. Sadly, I’m afraid we may never see that “When Romney Came to Town” video now. Rats!

According to an article in the NYT, Romney’s advisers have been “shaken by attacks” on the candidate’s record at Bain Capital.

Although the advisers had always expected that Democrats would malign Mr. Romney’s work of buying and selling companies, they were largely unprepared for an assault that came so early in the campaign and from within the ranks of their own party, those involved in the campaign discussions said.

Even as Mr. Romney coasted to victory in New Hampshire, they worry that the critique could prove more potent as the race shifts to South Carolina, where shuttered mills dot the landscape, unemployment is higher and suspicion of financial elites is not limited to left-leaning voters.

Both Iowa and New Hampshire have unemployment rates in the 5% range.

In his victory speech Tuesday night, Mr. Romney lamented that “desperate Republicans” were attacking the free enterprise system and the very notion of success.

“This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation,” he said. “The country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy.”

That message was echoed by Mr. Romney’s surrogates and embraced by a number of influential conservatives on Tuesday, from Rush Limbaugh to Michelle Malkin and the Club for Growth.

Unfortunately, the attacks seem to have caused many conservative who were previously unenthusiastic about Romney to rise to his defense.

At conservative blog Patterico’s Pontifications, “Karl” points out that it’s a little strange that Romney’s advisers weren’t expecting this, since Republican rivals have brought the issue up in Romney’s previous campaigns. I’m curious to see how all this will play in South Carolina.

Charlie Pierce had a bit of interesting Massachusetts gossip yesterday afternoon. Apparently one of Romney’s close advisers, Eric Fehrnstrom, is also an adviser to Senator Scott Brown, who as we all know is involved in a tough reelection fight with Elizabeth Warren.

Anyway, the gossip around the Massachusetts GOP — which is a small enough group that gossip can circulate at speeds at which matter is spontaneously created — is that some people in McDreamy’s re-election campaign have begun to complain that Fehrnstrom is spending too much time with Willard and not enough with their man, who’s in a much tougher fight with Elizabeth Warren than Romney is with the assemblage of second-raters in the Republican primary. It’s hard to see how Fehrnstrom can keep both of those balls in the air at the same time and, if he can’t, my guess is that McDreamy is the loser. This will not be a good thing for that campaign.

And speaking of Liz Warren, she raised twice as much money as Brown in the last quarter.

She has just over $6 million on hand, her campaign reported this afternoon.

Warren’s overall fund-raising for those few final months of 2011 outpaced Republican Senator Scott Brown’s total for the same time period. On Monday, Brown’s campaign released figures showing that he collected $3.2 million in the final quarter of 2011 and raised a total of $8.5 million last year.

Still, Brown holds a strong advantage, having accumulated $12.8 million in his campaign account, a record amount for any Massachusetts candidate this early in the election cycle.

Michelle Obama denies that she ever had any disagreements with Rahm Emanuel, as was reported in the new book “The Obamas” by NYT writer Jodi Kantor.

Obama said in an interview that aired on CBS’s “This Morning” that she does not routinely interfere in West Wing business despite reports that she clashed with top West Wing aides and has expressed her concerns and displeasure about policy and politics through back channels.

“I don’t have conversations with my husband’s staff. I don’t go to the meetings,” she told King. “I guess it’s more interesting to imagine this conflicted situation here, a strong woman. But that’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day that Barack announced — that I’m some angry black woman.”

Obama said that she and former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel “never had a cross word” — despite Kantor’s reporting that they clashed over strategy and policy during Emanuel’s tenure.

In foreign news, another Iranian nuclear scientist has been assassinated. From the Globe and Mail:

Amid escalating threats, the covert war to thwart Iran’s efforts to get nuclear weapons took an ugly – if gruesomely familiar – turn Wednesday with the murder of a young Iranian nuclear scientist on a Tehran street.

It was the fourth such reported targeted assassination in two years, adding a dangerous new element to the escalating conflict over Iran’s refusal to rein in its nuclear program or to open it to international inspection.

Wednesday’s killing in North Tehran was similar to previous attacks. Using powerful magnets, a motorcyclist attached a small delayed-action bomb to a car carrying Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, a nuclear scientist and university professor.

The explosion killed the 32-year-old chemistry professor, who worked at the sprawling Natanz nuclear facility, and another person in the car, reports said. The pinpoint attack focused the blast into the car during the morning rush hour.

Wonderful. Are we being pushed into another war after just beginning to extricate ourselves from Iraq? The NYT reports that the covert actions are believed by “experts” to be coming from Israel, the Iranians, probably with good reason, assume the U.S. is also involved.

Iranian officials immediately blamed both Israel and the United States for the latest death, which came less than two months after a suspicious explosion at an Iranian missile base that killed a top general and 16 other people. While American officials deny a role in lethal activities, the United States is believed to engage in other covert efforts against the Iranian nuclear program.

The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any American complicity. The statements by the United States appeared to reflect serious concern about the growing number of lethal attacks, which some experts believe could backfire by undercutting future negotiations and prompting Iran to redouble what the West suspects is a quest for a nuclear capacity.

Both Obama and Hillary Clinton denied any U.S. involvement. Sure.

Finally, there’s a wonderful article by the late Christopher Hitchens in the new Vanity Fair: Charles Dickens’s Inner Child. I haven’t finished reading it yet, but so far I’m very much enjoying it. I love Dickens and reading the piece made me want to pick up on of his novels again soon–maybe I’ll reread my favorite one–“Our Mutual Friend.” What a great book it is!

That’s all I have for today. What are you reading and blogging about?

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