By Michael Steele, on Mon Jun 3, 2013 at 2:09 PM ET From The Huffington Post:
 Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele is weighing a run for Maryland governor, a move that could put him back into the realm of electoral politics, he said Monday.
“We’re looking at it,” Steele, now an MSNBC contributor, told the network’s Chuck Todd. “You’re gonna take a look at the numbers. Maryland’s a tough state, there are a lot of challenges there.”
Steele went on to say that new taxes in Maryland over the past eight years could give a Republican another shot at winning a statewide election in the the reliably blue state. He served as lieutenant governor under Republican Robert Ehrlich during his single term. Democrat Martin O’Malley defeated Ehrlich in 2006 and again in 2010, but is term-limited from running again in 2014.
Speaking last week on WMAL, Steele similarly admitted interest in a gubernatorial run.
“I love my state,” Steele said, according to the Daily Caller. “I think the potential in Maryland is huge. I look at the last 8 years. I look at the tax increases. I look at some of the things they’ve done to drive jobs away and opportunity out the door. And you just kinda say, ‘Can you contribute something?’ So we’ll weigh it.”
Steele’s previous attempt at politics in Maryland was unsuccessful, when he lost a Senate race to Democrat Ben Cardin in 2006. While Steele didn’t win, his campaign did produce this memorable ad about puppies and political attacks.
Click here to read the full article.
By Jeff Smith, on Tue May 28, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET  Q: If you were Anthony Weiner, would you run for mayor?
—L.G., Brooklyn
Full disclosure: Not being a native, I’m just learning New York City politics.
I always find irony—and sometimes tragedy—in the stories of disgraced pols who rush for immediate reinvention in the same ego-nurturing and soul-crushing arena that initially got them in trouble. It’s as if the Weiners and Sanfords of the world have determined that the artificial politico personas they have so painstakingly created are the only versions of themselves that they can still recognize. But true redemption requires you to hit the pause button, to sublimate ambition and reflect on what truly matters.
That said, if I were Weiner and felt that I’d done the necessary reparative work in my personal life, I’d run for either comptroller or public advocate. Though comptroller candidate Scott Stringer is familiar to Manhattanites, no one in either race has high citywide name ID, so both would be easier races and would be outside the blinding glare of a mayoral campaign. Of course, Weiner would still get more press than just about any candidate in the country, except perhaps the two who make the mayoral runoff.
In a nutshell, if he loses his next race, he’s done. So if he wants a career in public life, he should pick a race without a well-known front-runner like Christine Quinn. Then he can get time in a low-profile office where he could rehabilitate and position himself for a mayoral race in which his chances are better. Given his skills at self-promotion, this would seem reasonable. But right now just seems too soon to go for the Big Enchilada.
Q: I’d like to run for office in the next decade, but I’m a Democrat in a Republican-leaning area. I could move a few towns over and run as a Democrat, or I could switch parties and stay where I am. What would you advise?
—K.G., Location fluid!
You might also have noted in your signature that your principles are fluid.
I understand party affiliation can be easily shed—hell, look at Mayor Bloomberg. And I’m not averse to the concept; I helped an old friend switch parties years ago, and he may end up becoming Missouri’s next governor. But you seem a bit too malleable—willing to move, willing to switch parties, whatever it takes.
Ideally, a candidate needs a strong set of principles and a deep commitment to his community. Often candidates have one or the other. You appear to be lacking both, which is troubling.
It’s one thing to be a hungry candidate. It’s another thing to be starving. If I were you, I’d try to nail down exactly why you’re a Democrat, and then do some civic work in your community. Then write me again in a few years and I’ll be glad to help.
Read the rest of…
Jeff Smith: Do As I Say — A Political Advice Column
By Mona Tailor, on Thu May 23, 2013 at 2:00 PM ET Sunday, May 19, 2013.
Never mind that I had to get up early on a weekend morning.
Never mind that I had to park a few blocks away to get to the venue so I would not have to search for a parking spot.
Never mind the fact that I waited in a line stretching to another state on a bridge for 2 hours to get through security.
Never mind that I did not have time to eat a breakfast or for that matter lunch today.
Never mind that it was so hot I was a sweaty mess by the time the event actually started.
Never mind any of those things from today.
They do not matter, for I had the great fortune of being in attendance today as the Dalai Lama spoke to an audience of thousands in Louisville.
Once I was able to see him and hear his message, any of the above frustrations was gone from my memory. His Holiness had a simple message; we are all capable of compassion. It is our “default setting” as one of the speakers, Dr. Doty stated in his remarks. Sometimes it is our circumstance, our ego, our bias or our environment that clouds this default nature within us.
 Regardless, we are all capable of compassion by seeing ourselves in others. Even for wrongdoers, we can show them compassion by separating the wrongdoer from their action. It is a world of compassion, of tolerance, of humanity that we are looking to create “as man has matured” and we have expanded our scope with small acts of kindness. Though compassion makes for a good slogan, this goes beyond words; this compassion in us begins by taking action.
This compassion and kindness towards others is what I experienced in line waiting for this event. In my 28 years in Kentucky, I had never seen a more diverse group of people gathering for an event. There were people of many different nations, languages, religions, dress all gathered for one single purpose. The air amongst the crowd was of understanding, of tolerance, of compassion.
In particular, the individuals around me were amazing. There was the young mother from my hometown of Bowling Green, KY who had offered to both her sons the opportunity to see the Dalai Lama speak, and her 8 year old choosing to come with her.
Then there was the mother and son duo who had flown from Texas to Louisville for the sole purpose of seeing the Dalai Lama speak.
For me, it was an honor to hear the Dalai Lama speak. He exuded a sense of calmness, peace, and serenity. I enjoyed listening to every word he spoke and watching every action he made in greeting every person he came across. You could tell the audience felt the same way. As he spoke the entire audience hung on his every word. He captured and sustained their attention the way he captured mine.
As we all left at the end of the event, the serenity and peace of his presence stayed with us. His compassion inspired you, regardless of faith, to be a better human being, full of compassion, caring and tolerance. “Compassion begins here [points to his heart]”. I truly believe this was a great start to experience this compassion.
By Krystal Ball, on Mon Apr 29, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET From Feministing.com:
 Krystal Ball is someone that we can all learn from. At 29, she ran for Congress in Virgina’s first district. She would have been the youngest woman to serve in Congress ever, if elected. She didn’t win though. During her election, she faced a sexist smear campaign by her opponents on the right who leaked salacious college photos of Ball. (We covered this 2010 edition of sexist double standards here too.) Throughout the whole thing, she held her head high. When others might’ve crawled away from the spotlight, Krystal used that moment to shed light on the inequalities women face in the public sphere. In her response, she wrote:
I don’t believe these pictures were posted with a desire to just embarrass me; they wanted me to feel like a whore. They wanted me to collapse in a ball of embarrassment and to hang my head in shame.
Despite the people that wanted her to hang her head in shame, she did just the opposite. And she’s still speaking up and ruffling feathers. She’s currently one of four hosts on the MSNBC showThe Cycle, where she not only brings a progressive spin to current events, but also, at times, creatively uses her 5-year-old daughter to highlight the need for marriage equality (much to many on the right’s chagrin). She is a great example of someone bravely pushing boundaries, taking risks, and doing things her own way. And most of all, instead of letting negative experiences break her spirit, she uses them to lift herself higher.
And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five with Krystal Ball.
Anna Sterling: Looking back on your experience running for Congress, would you do it again?
Krystal Ball: Absolutely! Was I scared? Yes. Was it hard? Harder than childbirth. Were there some low moments? Of course. But overall, it was actually a fantastic and rewarding experience that made me stronger and that is a source of tremendous pride. I also think it’s incredibly important that as women we share stories not just of our successes but also of our failures. I ran. I lost. And not only was it not the end of the world, but it actually created the opportunity for me to do what I’m doing now. I think a lot of women don’t run for office because they’re afraid of losing. I’m here to say winning is fantastic but even in a loss, nothing is truly lost and much is gained.
AS: What steps do we need to take to end this double standard placed on women? And what advice would you give young women looking to possibly run for office, who are afraid to take that leap because of what could leak in this social media age?
KB: To end the double standard, we have to be willing to call out our friends and our opponents. To me the recent conversation about the President’s calling California Attorney General Kamala Harris the “best looking” Attorney General was quite interesting. There were a lot of men and women who considers themselves to be feminists who defended the President. Now look, there are worse things in the world than being called good looking and I’m not mad at the President or even really offended. But the fact remains that any sort of focus on a woman candidate’s appearance or clothes does in fact undermine her credibility with voters. There’s a brand new “Name it. Change it.” research from the Women’s Campaign Fund, Lake Research Partners, and the Women’s Media Fund that proves this point. So even though this President has in many ways been great for women, it’s still up to us to educate people about the impact even well-intentioned comments can have.
As for young women looking at public office, my advice would be two-fold. First, and this goes for men and women, be thoughtful about what you put out on social media. But second, if there is some stupid party photo from your youthful days out there, don’t let that put fear in your heart or stop you from running. In my race, while it was painful and embarrassing when party photos of me were posted, there was also something beautiful about the number of people of all political persuasions who rushed to my defense. Many told me that the photos just made them feel like I was a real human being. In the final analysis, based on our polling, they didn’t end up hurting me electorally one bit and may have actually marginally improved my vote totals.
Click here to read the entire interview.
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Apr 26, 2013 at 4:06 PM ET Terrific piece about politics and celebrity by POLITICO’s Glenn Thrush — and not just because he calls me “affable.”
I must also clarify: While, contrary to much of the political establishment, I believed that Ashley Judd would have been the stronger candidate against Mitch McConnell, I do believe that Alison Lundergan Grimes can beat him, and I hope that she ultimately decides to run:
Jonathan Miller, an affable Harvard law graduate, former Kentucky state treasurer and onetime Democratic gubernatorial candidate, is one of Ashley Judd’s biggest fans. But he has a little trouble recalling any of her movies.
“Kiss the Girls”? Not so much. “Norma Jean and Marilyn”? No. “A Dolphin’s Tale”? Doesn’t ring a bell.
“‘Sisters’!” he says, conjuring Judd’s NBC series, “I remember that from the ’90s. … That was good.”
It wasn’t star worship that impelled Miller to become a driving force behind the unsuccessful push to draft the Kentucky-bred actress and liberal activist to challenge the powerful incumbent Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, for reelection in 2014. It was about money and power. In that respect, Louisville isn’t much different from Hollywood or Washington.
Democrats and Republicans dismissed the candidacy as a distraction and a joke, but Judd’s celebrity, Miller knew, translated to instant cash and cachet. Kentucky Democrats, he reckoned, could save millions they would otherwise have to spend on get-to-know-you advertising to increase their candidate’s name recognition by having someone famous, like Judd, on the ticket. The local and national media would be all over the race, drawn to the irresistible storyline of the lissome, earnest liberal facing down a five-term Machiavelli in wire rims demonized by Democrats as an arch-obstructionist.
“Celebrity was a large part of why I thought Ashley would have been great,” said Miller, who thought the choice of local Democrats, Kentucky’s low-key, 34-year-old Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, would almost certainly fall to McConnell.
“It’s a constant struggle for an ambitious candidate to make news or raise money. Name recognition would have been the most obvious advantage for Ashley, but the more important benefit is the free media attention,” he added. “Sure, they’d go after her as a member of the Hollywood elite. But the esteem for politicians around here is so low, people are less likely to hold that kind of thing against her. I mean no one could accuse her of being a regular politician. …
“She was a celebrity, but she was also an outsider. Nowadays, being an insider is worse.”
Judd’s flirtation reflects Hollywood’s through-the-looking-glass relationship with politics — no longer merely fodder for story lines but a forum for their own aspirations. A new generation of celebrities is more attracted to policy than publicity — a younger, unapologetically liberal group of activist-stars inspired by the examples of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 campaign.
Click here to read the full piece.
By Krystal Ball, on Fri Apr 26, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
By Artur Davis, on Tue Apr 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Give the New Republic’s Adam Winkler credit for laying some of the blame for the collapse of background checks on gun sales not just on NRA sophistry but on a poorly executed, badly timed, overly polarizing campaign by the Obama Administration. As Winkler points out, the over-reach of going after an assault weapon ban boomeranged badly, serving only to galvanize opposition and define even incremental regulations as a wedge to confiscate guns. And the virtues of a go-for-broke strategy, whatever they were, never compensated for the fact that no assault weapons ban had even a remote chance of passing the House.
I would add an additional point that goes much deeper than tactics and the debate over guns. To a degree that could not have been anticipated, and seems doubly odd for a reelected president, Barack Obama smothers his own initiatives. He has the capacity to lend eloquence to his own followers’ views, but no demonstrated ability to organize them behind any cause other than putting him in office. He moves literally no sector of the electorate that didn’t vote for him. His intervention in a legislative fight seems good primarily for preserving gridlock. Obama wins elections but through pathways that close quickly and elevate few specific policy aims: in 2008, a backlash against George Bush’s unpopularity and an airy promise of a post-racial society, and in 2012, a relentlessly negative siege against Mitt Romney. And the country that has elected Obama twice is still split to the core, more so today than when he was a senator signing book contracts. And the deepest splits are more around the country’s perception of Obama than around any singular issue.
 None of this means, of course, that there are not a variety of other elements that contribute to the hyper-polarization of the past four years, from the internet’s inevitable pipeline for misinformation, to the continued weight of interest groups like the NRA, to a cable culture that dismisses any efforts by politicians to craft a middle ground as expediency. But it would take an element of willful denial to ignore the fact that Obama occupies the single most divisive space in American politics since Nixon, and that one of the costs is a presidency that is frustratingly weak at persuasion.
It is not too early to wonder if Obama a generation from now looks weirdly like, of all people, Margaret Thatcher: a highly effective campaigner whose victories spun off the unintended consequence of an entrenched cultural opposition, and whose “conviction politics” seem like a relic. Twenty plus years after Thatcherism formally ended, it has been supplanted by a run of center-leaning British prime ministers with a penchant for downplaying sharp ideological rifts. It is not hard to imagine that Obama’s successors won’t be similarly preoccupied with navigating away from the intense divisions of the Obama era.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: Obama the Polarizer
By Jonathan Miller, on Mon Apr 15, 2013 at 4:25 PM ET From Jack Brammer of the Lexington Herald-Leader:
FRANKFORT — Actress Ashley Judd has bought a house once owned by her father in Ashland, the northeastern Kentucky city where she spent part of her childhood.
Judd paid $120,000 on March 21 for a house on Morningside Drive in the city’s Beverly Hills subdivision, according to Jay Woods, chief deputy in the Boyd County Property Valuation Administrator’s office.
The purchase occurred six days before Judd, a Tennessee resident, ended speculation that she would run for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky against Republican incumbent Mitch McConnell.
Boyd County PVA Chuck Adkins said the house once belonged to Judd’s father, Michael Charles Ciminella, a marketing analyst for the horse racing industry.
The house, built in 1944, has 1,405 square feet with three bedrooms and one bathroom, according to Homes.com.
Adkins said Judd’s father had sold the house to a next-door neighbor, Beth O. Kee, and she sold it to Judd last month through the law firm of Edwards & Klein. A spokesman with the law firm declined to comment.
Click here to read the full story
UPDATED (8:00 PM)
From Roger Alford of the Associated Press:
FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — Actress Ashley Judd had purchased a house in the northeastern Kentucky city of Ashland when she was considering running for U.S. Senate.
Boyd County Property Valuation Administrator Chuck Adkins said Monday that Judd paid $120,000 for the house that once belonged to her father, Michael Charles Ciminella. The deal was finalized in March, about a week before Judd announced her decision not to run against U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell.
“It was kind of her old home place,” Adkins said of the modest home on Morningside Drive. “I think it was for sentimental reasons.”
…
Judd supporter Jonathan Miller, a former two-term state treasurer, said he sees the home purchase as an indication the actress wants to be involved in Kentucky politics.
Miller didn’t discredit speculation that Judd could be looking ahead to 2016 when Kentucky’s other Senate seat, held by Republican Rand Paul, is up for election.
“That could be an open seat, if Rand runs for president,” Miller said. “And those open Senate seats come along very seldom.”
Click here to read the full piece.
By Artur Davis, on Tue Apr 9, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Sometimes, a hackneyed, unoriginal argument still has a virtue: in this case, capturing the left’s laziness and mendacity in such an unabashed manner that it provides the perfect occasion for rebuttal. So, consider Ta-Nehisi Coates’ take-down of Ben Carson in the New York Times.
Coates’ theory is that Carson is the latest phase of an eight year initiative, “a Republican plan”, to locate a black conservative to counter Barack Obama. As evidence, the existence of four black men who have flickered in and out of the spotlight during Obama’s ascension: Alan Keyes, Michael Steele, Allen West, and Herman Cain. In pulling together these loose strands, Coates overlooks an array of inconvenient facts—that only one of them, Steele, emerged as the product of any sort of party-wide process; that West openly complains that national Republicans ignored him during his failed congressional reelection; that Cain was about as much a product of a grand Republican strategy as Michelle Bachman, who surged for about as long as Cain did; and that Keyes was not so much hand-picked, more a self anointed sacrifice with a history of parachuting into quixotic races.
The only vague line connecting all four, much less all four and Carson, is their sharing of the same skin color. Coates takes that and runs with it, with the very same snide cynicism that he charges conservatives have practiced in elevating these “Black Hopes of the moment.” It is the left’s usual penchant for dismissing conservatives, with the underlying innuendo that a black conservative’s advancement is a fraud that could never transpire without conspiracy or the hand-out of affirmative action. In other words, the same poison that Coates’ writings routinely suggest is at the root of any right-winger’s skepticism of black accomplishment, from Obama all the way down to the corner office.
I have no doubt that a part of Carson’s appeal is that he is vivid proof that not every black embraces an activist, expanding government. But at the risk of upsetting both Coates’ and Sean Hannity’s narratives, I see Carson more in the vein of, say, a Bill Gates or a Mark Zuckerberg, spectacularly successful achievers whose run of success earns them a public policy stage. That makes Carson not a race pawn, but the beneficiary of a common American archetype of making all purpose experts and role models out of gifted people.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: Taking Ben Carson Seriously
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Apr 5, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET
“Someone in Heaven this yesterday said, “Cut, print, that’s a wrap!”
And gave a thumbs up.
RIP Roger Ebert
===
I never met Roger Ebert. But I felt like I knew him. How many critics can you say that about?
Roger Ebert was the most human of critics in my lifetime. My first years as an avid fan of Siskel & Ebert, I favored the more academic and cerebral Siskel.
But as I matured, I found myself leaning toward Roger Ebert. And the last two decades I looked to Roger Ebert if I ever wanted to understand the meaning of a film. Or decide if I should go to a film based on the quality of that film. Or, and this is most important, if I wanted to know what a film had to teach about life.
I don’t think there will ever be a film critic who will teach us more about life through the medium of film. That is because there will never be another critic who loved film as much as Roger Ebert. And who loved life equally as much as the art he critiqued.
Most critics love their art but too often hide behind it instead of embracing life. Roger Ebert was one critic who rose above his peers and helped to create an art form of covering an art form—and managed to marry a love of the art he covered with a gift for communicating the mechanics and mystery and magic of film. As one human to another.
We lost a great friend today that most of us never met. The one who also happened to be our greatest film critic.
Roger Ebert, is somewhere today, I suspect, critiquing the production choices of Heaven.
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