Charles Pierce: The nickel drops with a resounding thunk.
Nancy Pelosi: “These very same people holding in contempt are part of a nationwide scheme to suppress a vote. They are closely aligned with those who are suffocating the system, special interests, secret money, and they are poisoning the debate. They are poisoning the debate with that money. And so what does the average citizen say? They throw up their hands and they say, a pox on both your houses, and that is a victory for the special interest”……
1:40: President Obama delivers remarks calling on Congress to stop interest rates on student loans from doubling on July 1
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Thanks amk
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NYT Editorial: The political feud between the White House and Congressional Republicans has now culminated in a House oversight committee vote to cite Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for criminal contempt. His supposed crime is failing to hand over some documents in an investigation of a botched gunrunning sting operation known as “Fast and Furious.”
The Republicans shamelessly turned what should be a routine matter into a pointless constitutional confrontation. And the White House responded as most administrations do at some point: it invoked executive privilege to make a political problem go away.
…. Mr. Issa has relished making this investigation a political fight….There was no reason the House committee and the Justice Department could not work out a deal to produce the documents requested, or some form of them. Instead, they show again that every issue, large or small, can be turned into ammunition for political combat.
TPM: Mitt Romney’s campaign asked Florida Gov. Rick Scott to downplay his state’s job growth after several press releases from the governor’s campaign and messages from the Florida Chamber of Commerce trumpeted gains for the month of May, according to Bloomberg News.
Florida’s unemployment rate dropped from 8.7 percent in April to 8.6 percent in May, though still significantly above the national rate of 8.2 percent.
A Romney adviser reportedly requested that Scott’s office say that Florida’s unemployment rate could improve faster under a Romney presidency….
The development is perhaps one of the clearest examples of the messaging predicament the Romney campaign finds itself in …. when you ask Republican governors how things are going, especially in swing states, the economic picture starts to brighten considerably…
First Lady Michelle Obama greets patrons before eating lunch at Nacho’s Restaurant in Pueblo, Colo., June 20, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Sonya N. Hebert)
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Morning everyone 😉
As usual, I’m waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay behind in replying to emails, will try to catch up soon.
Charles Pierce: Well, we seem to have a real rage-gasm on our hands now. The president has gone and said the conjuring words, “executive privilege,” thereby presuming to do something once that the previous president did four times in a month back in 2007. And, as we know, for some odd reason – Ooh, ooh, I know! Ask me! – whenever this president does something that other presidents have done, it is a constitutional outrage of biblical proportions.
…. Expect to hear a lot of this, but do not expect to hear much about how horrified they all were when the previous administration invoked the same privilege to monkey-wrench an investigation into how thoroughly they’d politicized the DOJ.
(Please, someone explain to me that whatever is in those documents that the Congress so desperately wants could possibly be anything more than how this administration made the mistake of signing onto a policy idea promoted by the previous gang of idiots….)
….If this is more evidence that the president has tumbled to the fact that his political enemies are completely unappeasable, well, that penny took god’s own time to drop, but I’m glad it did. They want Eric Holder’s head on a stick. They should be told, repeatedly, where that stick should be stored.
The Obama Diary 
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