A member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Oklahoma apologized Tuesday for his involvement in a racist chant that sparked outrage across the country this week. “I am deeply sorry for what I did Saturday night. It was wrong and reckless,” Parker Rice said in a statement obtained by the Dallas Morning News.
Like many of you, my formative political experiences were in my 20s. And for me, that meant the Clinton years. I was just shy of 24 when Bill Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993 and living in Washington in my early 30s when he left office. I don't think anyone could be a bigger Clinton diehard than I was in those days. And if it were still the mid- or late 90s, with all the frivolity and nonsense that characterized those years, I still would be. When I was trying to make my way into journalism in the late 90s, I considered writing a book at the phenomenon of Clinton-hating, which I still think would be a fascinating book because feelings about Bill Clinton, on both sides of the equation, are a fascinating way to explore intricacies of that decade.
The University of Oklahoma football team and coaches line up wearing all black in the Everest Training Center in protest of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Oklahoma on Monday, March. 9, 2015.
So who is Tom Cotton exactly? His resume is admittedly impressive. MoJo says here that his win last November was a big win for the neocons who have been semi-eclipsed (but they never go away) during the Obama era. That's true. But I think it goes a bit beyond that.
Vice President Biden released a blistering statement attacking Republican Senators decision to send a letter advising the Islamic Republic of Iranian to ignore US Presidential diplomacy. Text after the jump ...
Lindsey Graham has a revealing answer as to why he's never used email: "I've tried not to have a system where I can just say the first dumb thing that comes to my mind. I've always been concerned."
I wanted to give you a brief update on the Israeli election, which is coming up on March 17th. The poll of polls maintained by Haaretz now shows Likud and Zionist Camp/Labor tied at 23 seats. Their count tends to run behind a day or so, but there's been a flurry of new polls. I don't have enough of a sense of the comparative merits of the difference in pollsters to be able to sift beneath that topline number.
I want to touch on something I've been thinking a lot about and have alluded to a few times. Just as we're hearing more and more about ISIS and the threat it poses, we're actually seeing more and more evidence that it is losing ground on its own turf. Let me start with two pieces in The Washington Post in the last couple days.
A Republican aide was on the phone with late Missouri State Auditor Tom Schweich just before he killed himself. He told her about his outrage over a whispering campaign about his religion, threatened to kill himself and then handed the phone to his wife. Seconds later, Schweich's wife Kathy said, "He shot himself!"
I mentioned yesterday that the first two post-Speech polls out of Israel showed a modest bump for Prime Minister Netanyahu — neither the no-effect Zionist Camp/Labor was hoping for or the big bump Likud wanted. Now we have a third poll and it shows no effect at all.
"Despite a small minority of Democrats and Israeli reporters seeking to curry favor with Obama, Netanyahu's speech to Congress elicited overwhelming support."
Israel Hayom (Israel Today) is the money-losing free news daily which Sheldon Adelson set up in 2007 mainly to support Benjamin Netanyahu. In Israel it is often mocked "Bibiton" (The Bibi News, roughly). But through a mix of being free and popular it rocketed to being the most-read news daily. Netanyahu's opponents — not unreasonably — complain that the entire thing is a massive campaign/propaganda contribution to Netanyahu. In any case, I was looking at its English language version today and here's the 'deck' for their lead article on the site ...
