Morning Reads: Police Struck Back at Prosecutor Who Brought Shooting Charges

Good morning — and a happy 45th birthday to Paul Ryan!

On this date in 1907, Charles Curtis of the Kaw Nation became the first Native American to serve in the United States Senate. The Kansas Republican would go on become Senate majority leader and then vice president under Herbert Hoover.

And in 2002, during his State of the Union address, George W. Bush claimed that Iraq, Iran and North Korea “constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

Retaliation –> Two Israeli soldiers and a Spanish UN peacekeeper were killed on the Lebanese border on Wednesday as Hezbollah fighters exchanged missile and artillery fire with Israeli forces. According to Reuters, Hezbollah claimed the attack was an act of retaliation for an Israeli airstrike in Syria the week before last that killed six of its fighters and an Iranian general. AND: Christa Case Bryant and Nicholas Blanford report for The Christian Science Monitor that both sides are struggling to prevent the flare-up from escalating into a larger ground war.

Policing the police –> At ThinkProgress, Nicole Flatow writes that after Albuquerque District Attorney Kari Brandenburg brought charges against two police officers for killing an unarmed homeless man, her office was prevented from investigating subsequent shootings and she faced a police investigation herself. Flatow writes that “a detective working on the case admitted in a recording that the claims were ‘super-weak — it’s probably not gonna go anywhere,’ but ‘it’s gonna destroy her career.'”

Two Americas –> A Reuters’ analysis of federal spending reveals that the reddest states have shouldered a disproportionate share of cuts to federal spending on “a wide swath of discretionary grant programs, from Head Start preschool education to anti drug initiatives.” While “many factors other than politics come into play,” the report notes that the disparity in cuts “only shows up in federal aid that is most directly controlled by the administration.”

Bad news for Mother Earth –> Lindsay Abrams writes at Salon that the Koch brothers’ plan to spend almost $1 billion on the 2016 race could be a huge boon for groups working to cast doubt on the scientific evidence of human-caused global warming.

It’s working –> The CBO’s projection for all federal spending on health care between 2011-2020 has fallen by $600 million, despite the additional $1 trillion it will cost to cover 27 million more people under Obamacare. Paul Van de Water crunches the numbers at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ blog, Off The Charts.

Some people eat ice cream –> If you’re Mitt Romney, you cope with loss by going on what The Boston Globe describes as “a real estate spree.” Romney hadn’t planned on another foray into politics, so he wasn’t concerned about adding in rapid succession three new multimillion dollar homes to his property collection. “But now that he’s considering a third presidential bid,” writes the Globe’s Matt Viser, “the monuments of his wealth could become a political inconvenience, particularly as one of his key themes has been America’s growing income divide.” ALSO: The WSJ has Karl Rove’s take on how things might shake out in a crowded GOP presidential field.

The other housing crisis –> We tend to think of the housing crunch as a distinctly urban phenomenon, but Gillian White writes for The Atlantic that the rural poor face home prices beyond their means and a serious problem with “the terrible condition of existing homes.”

No more Mr. Nice Guy –> Jake Sherman, Lauren French and Anna Palmer report for Politico that the “House Republican leadership’s crackdown against dissenters is continuing.” The latest sign is a plan to “boot lawmakers from the leadership’s elite vote-counting team if they oppose party-line procedural motions.” They add that the move “might sound like insignificant inside baseball,” but it’s actually a “critical development — and yet another sign that top Republicans are looking to ostracize troublemakers in the Capitol.”

“Defies the image of submissive women in the jihadist world” — WaPo’s Hugh Naylor and Suzan Haidamous have a fascinating piece about the arrest in Lebanon of the former wife of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and what it reveals about the role of women in Islamic fundamentalist communities.

“We’re in a technological arms race with bears” –> Gizmodo’s Wes Siler writes that, because bears are intelligent, excellent tool-users and “share their tech knowledge with other bears nearby,” bear-proofing technology “rarely works for more than a couple of decades before every bear knows how to crack it.”

Don’t say you weren’t warned!

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