News Nuggets 1173

DAYLEE PICTURE: A baby Indian rhino at the Basel Zoo in Switzerland.  From ZooBorns.

Broad Powers Seen for Obama in Cyberstrikes from the New York Times 
"The administration is moving to approve the nation’s first rules for how the military can defend, or retaliate, against a major cyberattack."

10 Surprises About Tomorrow's Job Market from the Christian Science Monitor
"In sharp contrast to today's tepid job growth, employment will pick up later this decade and feature some unusual twists – from the rise of sales jobs to the dearth of 'green' ones. Here's a guide to help navigate it."

Now We Know: Bush Did Not Lie About WMD in Iraq (Stephen L. Carter) from Bloomberg News Service
"His ironic conclusion: “Everyone, including the spies, was convinced by the intelligence that said Saddam had the weapons,” he writes. Yet “they were not sure it looked strong enough to win the argument.”"
Carter presents a compelling case that Bush & Company did not lie about WMD.  I'm more interested in what actually happened than carrying a partisan ax to throw at W. Bush for the foreseeable future.  This in no way minimizes that Bush and his (and Blair's) people were wrong -- and that being wrong had catastrophic consequences for the US and for Iraq and the region around it.  I AM still very suspicious of the "EVERYONE knew" claim.  Many observers DID question the intelligence at the time -- and the Bush people DID railroad the country towards war.  "Oops, we made a mistake!" won't cut it when historians render final judgement on Bush 43.  Still one of the worst presidents. Ever.

Report Outlines Plan To Fix Long Lines On Election Day (Chelsea Kiene) from the Huffington Post
"As the federal government works to address the long lines and administrative problems voters nationwide faced on Election Day, a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice argues that the first steps should be modernizing voter registration, providing a national period for early voting and setting minimum standards for polling place access."

For Republicans, it's Not Enough: Why the GOP's Latino Problems Extend Well Beyond Immigration Policy from the Economist [of London]
"Perhaps the most common element of the "natural Republican" argument for Latinos is the cultural-conservative one. It doesn't stack up well."

The Hagel Hearings: Congressional Politics at Its Worst (Doug Bandow) from the CATO Institute
"Hagel is under fire because he disputed neoconservative nostrums to speak unpleasant truths to the Republican Party.  ... he was an Eisenhower, not a Dubya, Republican: Hagel criticized the debacle in Iraq, urged negotiation to forestall Iran from developing nuclear weapons, and backed reductions in today’s bloated military budget. General turned President Dwight Eisenhower could not have put it better.  But this enraged a GOP that has turned perpetual war into its most important foreign policy plank."

Backstage Glimpses of Clinton as Dogged Diplomat, Win or Lose from the New York Times
"The instincts of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the departing secretary of state, were often more activist than those of a White House that has kept a tight grip on foreign policy."

Bobby Jindal to 2016 Hopefuls: Get Your Heads Examined from Politico 
“Anybody on the Republican side even thinking or talking about running for president in 2016, I’ve said needs to get their head examined and the reason I say that is we’ve lost two presidential elections in a row. We need to be winning the debate of ideas — then we’ll win elections,” Jindal said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.”
Such a statement should logically preclude Jindal himself from running.  But no one is reading it that way.

Four Things That are True (Even if Republicans Don’t Want Them to Be) (Joy-Ann Reid) from the Reid Report
"The Republican Party continue to beat their heads with their open hands, wondering where it all went wrong. But the really, really bad news is that it’s going to keep going wrong. For a long, long time. Here are four things that are true, whether Republicans like it or not."

Why Does the Media Go Easy on Barack Obama? (Conor Friedersdorf) from the Atlantic
"If we're trying to explain why the press is insufficiently adversarial, it's important to grapple with typical press behavior rather than aberrations.  That grappling makes it clear that "liberal media bias" doesn't explain the problem."

Nothing New Under the Wingnut Sun: 'Survivalism' (Rick Perlstein) from the Nation
"... the brittle worldview that drives the survivalist mentality—the imagination of one’s one innocent enclave, always ever threatened by siege from dread unnamed Others—was laid bare at the recent congressional hearings on gun control, when Gayle Trotter of the Independent Women’s Forum (incidentally: not independent, not by and for women, not a forum) spun out her delirious fantasy of “a young woman defending her babies in her home” by fending off “three, four, five violent attackers” with one of those lightweight, easy-to-handle assault rifles. ... We need to better understand where that comes from, and why it is not going away. So let’s get down to work."

MA-SEN: Tagg, You’re It for GOP Senate Hopes from the Boston Herald 
"Tagg Romney is considering a run in the special Senate election now that Scott Brown has opted out, the Truth Squad has learned."
I believe this is the son who said his dad, Mitt, seemed to have little interest in actually being president.  If so, I've been wondering who in the Romney family DID want Mitt to be president?  This mulling suggests that Tagg may have been one of the them.

BRITISH MONARCHY NUGGET!!
DNA Tests Confirm Skeleton Found in Leicestershire Car Park is That of King Richard III from the Independent [of the UK]
"A skeleton found last year under a council car park in Leicester has been shown “beyond reasonable doubt” to be that of King Richard III who died in the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, experts have concluded."