Weigel

Opening Act: Where’s the Money?

If it’s been a slow week for Washington, it’s been a fascinating few days on the international wealth beat. Spend a little time with the ICIJ’s investigations into leaked documents about offshore European tycoon wealth. State-owned Russian companies incorporated in the Virgin Islands! French socialists with cash hidden from the tax hikes!

Alex Pareene has a little fun with that story about the NRCC “imitating Buzzfeed” in the hope of making stories go viral on Facebook. Worth noting: The NRCC has a damn easy job for the next four cycles. Most of Ohio’s Republican delegation could start sleeping, right now, and still win their gerrymandered seats.

Charles Johnson witnesses the birth of a new right-wing Obama meme.

Obama said: “Well, the government is us. These officials are elected by you. They are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place. It’s a government of and by and for the people.”

Just a simple statement of fact, right? What could possibly be bad about this? Leave it to the raving kooks of the right wing blogs to find a way to distort Obama’s words and read things into it that he never said — in lockstep unison, because that’s how they do everything.

Only now can it be told: Scott Brown isn’t a genius. (The fact that some lazy columnists were saying, in 2010, that he should run for president tells you much of what you need to know about columnists.)

And Jackie Calmes gets her mitts on (a preview of) the White House’s budget, the wonderful shiny object that will rescue this city from the morass of this slow news period, and throw it into the entirely different morass of a legislative stalemate.