Give Them More

Via the Plank, I see that Nancy Pelosi is calling on Obama to restore the money cut from this year's transfer to Mexico under the Mérida Initiative. But since it was the Senate that cut the money over the preference of the White House, I'm not quite sure exactly why Obama is the focus of the calls for more cash, instead of the Senate. 

I sometimes feel petty when I point stuff like this out about the prose of someone whose writing ability I am not paid to grade, but then usually that feeling passes quickly. Examine the oddness of this sentence:

Violence reached new levels last month when the mayor of Juarez, a Mexican city with 1.6 million people that serves as a major transit point for drug smugglers, moved his family to El Paso, Texas, after receiving threats against his and their lives.

If you are aiming to support the hypothesis that "violence reached new levels," shouldn't you follow that with, you know, an actual act of violence? That's like writing, "We've never seen LeBron play a better game, as Anderson Varejao scored 38 points."