From the Epic Annals of Holy Crap

You have no doubt heard the on-going saga of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Though the video has never been publicly shown, three reporters have allegedly seen video of Ford smoking what appears to be crack cocaine with a group of Somali immigrant drug dealers. They appear to be the ones who are shopping the video of Ford smoking said crack. For the last week or more he’s been dodging the press and clearly unwilling and presumably unable to deny the videos existence or authenticity. Yesterday he emerged to give a classic non-denial denial of his apparent drug use.

Looking at this from the outside, setting aside that it’s problematic to have a serving mayor caught on tape doing drugs, I’ve had to ask: how does the sitting Mayor end up carousing with Somali crack dealers and smoking crack? Well, we may have an answer. The Globe and Mail has just published a lengthy, very lengthy look at the Ford family. And basically all Ford’s siblings have substantial past ties to the drug trade.

Arpaio Loses

A federal judge has handed Joe Arpaio a stinging defeat late today in Arizona, ruling that the sheriff’s office racially profiled Latinos during immigration sweeps.

Conspiracy Theories Left and Right

That’s what we’re discussing right now over at TPMPrime.

I Don’t Think That Helps

If I were advising on-the-ropes Toronto Mayor Rob Ford I’d advise him to get ahead of this story by becoming the first major elected official to come out in favor of medical crack. Instead he’s come forward with perhaps the most painful non-denial crack denial ever.

Did You See This?

A brief (video) history of presidential heckling.

Obligatory

Bob Dylan turns 72 today.

Quizzical

When I saw that President Obama had decided to nominate Victoria Nuland as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs that struck me as a pretty frontal ’There is no Benghazi scandal; get over it’ to Senate Republicans. After all, Nuland was the voice of the State Department in the Benghazi ‘talking points’ saga.

My Infamy Revealed

(Former?) TPM Reader SM says I’m profoundly mistaken on the hacking of US elections during the Bush years …

You wrote …

“Back in the early aughts it was a big, big thing for Dems talking about hacking Diebold voter machines. And there were lots of scary stories about how easily this could be done. There was also no evidence that it actually had been done. To be clear, I’m not saying it wasn’t a good idea to make these machines more secure, only that evidence trumps paranoia. Always.”

I am astounded at your ignorance regarding the electronic voting machines and the fraud involved in the use of them.

Game Over For Obamacare Saboteurs?

You may have seen this news yesterday, but if you missed it, please click through and give it a read.

The spoiler version is that out in California, where the state government and advocacy groups are actually interested in doing Obamacare right, things are looking pretty good. They’re standing up their exchanges and it turns out premiums for basic bronze and more comprehensive silver health plans will actually come in lower than anticipated.

This is almost unambiguously good news for Obamacare.

‘Nooney Tunes’

In case you missed this classic Jon Stewart segment on Peggy Noonan from this week (the excerpts from one of her audio books on Reagan are worth it all by themselves):

Just Wow

There’s a massive (70 meters wide), man-made circular structure, between 2,000 and 12,000 years old, at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee . And nautical archeologists are trying to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars it will take to go down and find out what it is.

Photos of Bridge Collapse in Wash State

Photo of Skagit River Bridge Collapse- @dustystarling twitter.com/NewsBreaker/st…

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 24, 2013

North end of I-5 bridge over #Skagit River collapsed twitter.com/Gina_SVH/statu…

— Gina Cole (@Gina_SVH) May 24, 2013

More updates here.